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LETTEKS 



TO 



THE JONE SE S 



TIMOTHY TITOOMB, 

AUTHOR OF " LETTERS TO TOTING PEOPLE," " GOLD FOIL," " LESSONS IN LIFE," 
ETC., ETC. 



ELEVENTH EDITION. 



NEW YORK : 
CHARLES SCRLBNER, 124 GRAND STREET. 

1864. 






Entebed, according to Act of Coagress, in the year 1888, 

BY CHARLES SCRIBNER, 

In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States for the Southern 
District of New York. 



JOHN F. TROW, 

FMCTEE AND STEREOTYPES, 

60 Greene street 



PEEFACJE 



These is pretension in all works of a didactic 
nature, while in those which are not only precep- 
tive, bat critical of character, motive and life, there 
is an assumption of superiority on the part of the 
author which can only fail of being offensive by 
being ignored. 

The writer of the Titcomb Series of Books has 
always felt this, and, however little he may have 
concealed himself, has hidden his head under the 
shadow of a nom de plume. The only apologies 
which he offers for appearing as a censor and a 
teacher, are his love of men, his honest wish to do 
them good, and his sad consciousness that his nom- 
inal criticisms of others are too often actual con- 
demnations of himself. 



6 Preface. 



Since the appearance of the author's "Letters 
to The Young," in 1858, he has received every year 
a large number of letters from their readers, asking 
for counsel in a wide variety of specific cases. 
While the present volume was not intended as a 
reply to these letters, it was naturally suggested by 
them. The author has attempted in it to present 
and criticise certain types of character and life, and 
to furnish motives and means for their improvement 
and reform. In order to do this successfully, it 
was found necessary to deal with personalities, to 
which it was desirable to give " a local habitation 
and a name;" and as the Smiths had been some- 
what overworked by the literary guild, as represen- 
tatives of the human race, it was determined to 
address the Joneses of Jonesville, who, though rep- 
resented in the well-known firm of Brown, Jones 
& Robinson, wers comparatively fresh in the field, 
and endowed with the average amount of " human 
nature." 

Now, if the reader will so far favor the author 
as to suppose that, when a young man, he taught 
the district school in Jonesville, "boarding around " 
according to the primitive New England fashion, 
that he has kept himself acquainted with the lives 
and fortunes of his old friends and pupils there, 



Preface. 7 

that they have known something of him, and, 
through an officious representative of the family, 
have requested him to write them letters for the 
public eye, which he had no time to write for their 
private reading, — I say, if the reader will suppose 
all this, he will supply all the necessary machinery 
of the book, and the writer will have his justifica- 
tion for the direct and homely talk in which he 
indulges toward the family. 

Springfield, October \ 1863. 



CONTENTS 



THE FIRST LETTER. 

FAOI 

To Deacon Solomon Jones— -Concerning his system of family 

government, 13 

THE SECOND LETTER. 
To Mrs. Martha Jones (wife of Deacon Solomon) — Concern- 
ing her system of family government, ... 27 

THE THIRD LETTER. 
To F. Mendelssohn Jones, Singing Master — Concerning the 

influence of his profession on personal charapter, . 41 

THE FOURTH LETTER. 
To Hans Sachs Jones, Shoemaker — Concerning his habit of 

business lying, 57 

THE FIFTH LETTER. 
iPo Edward Patson Jones — Concerning his failure to yield to 

his convictions of duty, 71 

THE SIXTH LETTER. 

To Mrs. Jessy Bell Jones— Concerning the difficulty she 

experiences in keeping her servants, .... 86 

THE SEVENTH LETTER. 
To Salathiel Fogg Jones, Spiritualist — Concerning the faith 

and prospects of his sect of religionists, . . . 100 



10 Contents. 



PAGB 

THE EIGHTH LETTER. 
To Binjamin Franklin Jones, Mechanic — Concerning his 

habitual absence from church on Sunday, . . . 115 

THE NINTH LETTER. 
To Washington Allston Jokes — Concerning the policy of 

making his brains marketable, 128 

THE TENTH LETTER. 
To Rev. Jeremiah Jones, P.D. — Concerning the failure of his 

pulpit ministry, 142 

THE ELEVENTH LETTER, 
To Stephen Girard Jones — Concerning the best way of spend- 
ing his money, . 157 

THE TWELFTH LETTER. 
To Noel Jones — Concerning his opinion that he knows pretty 

much everything, 171 

THE THIRTEENTH LETTER. 
To Rufus Choate Jones, Lawyer — Concerning the duties and 

dangers of his profession, . . . . . . 185 

THE FOURTEENTH LETTER. 
To Mrs. Royal Purple Jones — Concerning her absorbing de- 
votion to her own person, 200 

THE FIFTEENTH LETTER. 
To Miss Felicia Hemans Jones — Concerning her strong de- 
sire to become an authoress, 215 

THE SIXTEENTH LETTER. 
To Jehu Jones — Concerning the character and tendencies of 

the fast life which he is living, . . . . . 229 



Contents. 11 



THE SEVENTEENTH LETTER. 
To Thomas Arnold Jones, Schoolmaster — Concerning the re- 
quirements and the tendencies of his profession, . . 242 

THE EIGHTEENTH LETTER. 
To Mrs. Rosa Hoppin Jones — Concerning her dislike of 

routine and her desire for change and amusement, . 256 

THE NINETEENTH LETTER. 
To Jefferson Davis Jones, Politician — Concerning the im- 
morality of his pursuits, and their effect upon himself 
and his country, 269 

THE TWENTIETH LETTER. 
To Dr. Benjamin Rush Jones — Concerning the position ot 

himself and his profession, 284 

THE TWENTY-FIRST LETTER. 
To Diogenes Jones — Concerning his disposition to avoid 

society, 299 

THE TWENTY-SECOND LETTER. 
To Saul M. Jones — Concerning his habit of looking upon the 

dark side of things, 310 

THE TWENTY-THIRD LETTER. 
To John Smith Jones — Concerning his neighborly duties, and 

his failure to perform them, 322 

THE TWENTY-FOURTH LETTER. 
To Goodrich Jones, Jr. — Concerning his disposition to be 
content with the respectability and wealth which Ms 
father has acquired for him, . . . . . 835 



LETTERS TO THE JONESES. 



THE FIRST LETTER. 

Co geaton ^olamon: fonts. 

CONCERNING HIS S TSTEM OF FAMTL T GO VERNMENT. 

YOU are now an old man, and I do not expect that 
anything I shall write to you will do you good. 
I only seek, through what I say to you, to convey useful 
hints and lessons to others. It is not a pleasure to me 
to wound your self-love, or to disturb the complacency 
which you entertain amid the wreck of your family 
hopes. It is not delightful to assure you that your life 
has been a mistake from the beginning, and that your 
children owe the miscarriage of their lives to the train- 
ing which you still seem to regard as alike the offspring 
and parent of Christian wisdom. If there were not 



14 Letters to the Jonefes. 

others in the world who are making the same mistake 
that you have made, and moving forward to the same 
sad family disaster, you should hear from me no word 
that you could shape into a reproach. But you will 
soon pass away,, with the comforting assurance that 
your motives, at least, were good ; and to these, your 
only comforts, I commend you. 

You were once the great man of Jonesville. You 
then deemed it necessary to maintain a dignified de- 
portment, to take the lead in all matters of public 
moment, to manage the Jonesville church and the 
Jonesville minister, and to exercise a general supervis- 
ion of the village. There was not a man, woman, or 
child in the village who did not feel your presence as 
that of an independent, arbitrary power, that permitted 
no liberty of will around it. You had your notions of 
politics, religion, municipal affairs, education, social 
life ; and to these you tried to bend every" mind that 
came into contact with you. You undertook to think 
for your neighbors, and to impose upon them your own 
law in all things. If one independent man spoke out 
his thoughts, and refused to be bound to your "will, you 
persecuted him. You beset him behind and before, by 
petty annoyances. You took away his business. You 
sneered at him in public and private. In this way, 
you banished from Jonesville many men who would 
have been an honor to it, and finally alienated from 



To Deacon Solomon Jones. 15 

yourself the hearts of your own kindred. You drove a 
whole village into opposition to yourself. You forced 
them to a self-assertion that manifested itself in a mul- 
titude of improper and offensive ways. If you opposed 
a harmless dance at a neighbor's house, the villagers 
revenged themselves by holding a ball at the tavern. 
It took only a few years of your peculiar management 
to fill Jonesville with doggeries and loafers, and to 
prove to you that your village management had been a 
sorry failure. 

You seem to have conducted life upon the assump- 
tion that all the men in the world, with the single excep- 
tion of Deacon Solomon Jones, are incapable of self- 
government. It never has occurred to you, in any dis- 
pute with a neighbor, or in any difficulty which ar- 
rayed the public against you, that you could possibly be 
in the wrong ; and it always has offended you to think 
that any other Jones, or any other man, should dare to 
controvert your opinions, or question your decisions. 
And you were so stupid that, when all your neighbors — 
after much long-suffering and patient waiting upon your 
whims — rebelled against you, and went to extremes to 
show their independence of, and contempt for you, you 
attributed the work of your own hands to the devil. 

Deacon Jones, the Lord gave you brains, and Yan- 
kee enterprise got you money? Had there been 
proper management on your part, Jonesville would be 



16 Letters to the Jonefes. 

in your hands to-day ; but you are aware that by far 
the larger proportion of your fellow citizens either do 
not love you, or positively hate you. How has this 
state of things been arrived at ? Do you flatter your- 
self that you have been as wise as a serpent and harm- 
less as a dove ? Do you honestly believe that the loss 
of your influence is attributable rather to the popular 
than your own personal perverseness ? I do not expect 
to make you see it, but you really did your best to 
make slaves of your fellows, and your fellows, recog- 
nizing you as a tyrant, kicked over your throne, and 
tumbled you into your chimney corner, where alone 
you had the power to put your peculiar theories into 
practice. 

A man does not usually have one set of notions con- 
cerning neighborhood government and another concern- 
ing family government. You managed your own family 
very much as you undertook to manage your village. 
I can, indeed, bear witness that you gave your family 
line upon line and precept upon precept, but I am not 
so ready to concede that you trained them up in the 
right way. Tour family was an orderly one, I admit, 
but I have seen jails and houses of correction that were 
more orderly still. An orderly house is quite as liable 
to be governed too much, as a disorderly house is to be 
governed too little. 

I always noticed this fact, with relation to your 



To Deacon Solomon Jones. 17 

mode of family training. You enforced a blind obe- 
dience to your commands, and never deemed it neces- 
sary or desirable to give a reason for them. ( Kay, you 
told your children, distinctly, that it was enough for 
them that you commanded a thing to be done. ) You 
refused to give them a reason beyond your own wish 
and will. You placed yourself between them and their 
own consciences ; you placed yourself between them 
and their own sense of that which is just and proper 
and good ; vnay, you placed yourself between them and 
God, and demanded that they should obey you because 
you willed it—because you commanded them to obey 
you. 

It is comparatively an easy thing to get up an 
orderly family, on such a plan of operations as this. 
A man needs only to have a strong arm, and a broad 
palm, and a heart that never opens to parental tender- 
ness, to secure the most orderly family in the world. 
It is not a hard thing for a man who weighs two hun- 
dred pounds, more or less, to make a boy who weighs 
only fifty pounds, so much afraid of him as to obey his 
minutest commands. Indeed, it is not a hard thing to 
break down his will entirely, and make a craven of him. 
I declare to you, Deacon Jones, that the most orderly 
I families I have ever known were the worst governed ; 
and one of these families was your own. You are not 
the first man who has brought up " an orderly family," 



18 Letters to the Jonefes. 

and fitted them for the devil's hand by his system of 
government. 

ISTow will you just think for a moment what you did 
for your children ? I know their history, and in many 
respects it has been a bad one and a sad one. You 
governed them. You laid your law upon them. You 
forced upon them your will as their supreme rule of 
action. They did not fear God half as much as they 
did you, though, if I remember correctly, you repre- 
sented Him to be a sort of infinite Deacon Solomon 
Jones. ( They did not fear to lie half as much as they 
feared to be flogged. ; They became hyjDocrites through 
their fear of you, and they learned to hate you because 
you persisted in treating them as servile dependants. 
You put yourself before them and thrust yourself into 
their life in the place of God. You bent them to your 
will with those strong hands of yours, and you had " an 
orderly family." 

My friend, when I think of the families that have 
been trained and ruined in this way, I shudder. Your 
children were never permitted to have any will, and 
when they went forth from your threshold, they went 
forth emancipated slaves, and untried children in the 
use of liberty. When they found the hand of parental 
restraint removed, there was no restraint upon them. 
/ They had never been taught that most essential of all 
( government, self-government j and a man who has not 



To Deacon Solomon Jones. 19 

been taught to govern himself is as helpless in the 
world as a child. A family may be orderly to a degree 
of nicety that is really admirable, and still be as incapa- 
ble of self-government as a family of idiots. Families 
that might be reckoned by thousands have left orderly 
homes, all prepared for the destruction to which they 
rushed. 

The military commander knows very well that he 
says very little as to the moral character of his soldiers 
when he says that they are under excellent discipline. 
The drill of the camp may make the camp the most 
orderly of places, but this drill does not go beyond the 
camp, or deeper than the surface of the character. 
Take from the shoulders of these soldiers the strong 
hand of military control, and you will have — as ordinary 
armies go — a mass of swearing, gaming, drinking row- 
dies, ready to rush into any excess. [ The state prison is 
the most orderly place in the world.N The drill is fault- 
less. I know of no place where, among an equal number 
of men gathered from the lower walks of society, there 
are so few breaches of decorum ; yet, when the in- 
mates reappear in society, they are not improved. You 
undertook to introduce a military drill, or prison drill, 
or both, into your family ; and you foiled, precisely as 
generals and wardens fail. ■ You never recognized the 
fact that the essential part of a child's education is that 
of teaching him the use of his liberty, under the control 



20 Letters to the Jonefes. 

of his sense of that which is right and proper and laud- 
able in human conduct. You did not undertake to de. 
velop and enlighten that sense at all. SjSTou managed 
your children instead of teaching them how to manage 
themselves. You never appealed to their sense of 
honor, or to their sense of right or propriety, as the 
motive to any desirable course of conduct ; and when 
you placed your command upon one of them, and he 
dared to ask you after a reason, you crushed him 
into silence by assuring him that he had nothing to do 
with a reason. 

It is not uncommon to hear the assertion that the 
sons of ministers and deacons turn out badly. Statis- 
tics show that the statement is too broad, and yet com- 
mon observation unites in giving it some basis in truth. 
It is not at all uncommon to see the children of excel- 
lent parents — children who have been bred in the most 
orderly manner — going straight to destruction the mo- 
ment they leave the family roof and cease to feel 
parental restraint. These parents feel, doubtless, very 
much as you do, that it is all a mysterious dispensation 
of Providence ; but it is only the natural result of their 
style of training. 

I know of public institutions for the reform of va- 
grant children, that are celebrated for the delightful 
manner in which those children are brought to square 
their conduct by rule. They march like soldiers. 



To Deacon Solomon Jones. 21 

They sing like machines. They enter their school- 
room in silent files that would delight the eye of an 
Indian warrior. They recite in concert the most com- 
plicated prose and verse. They play by rule, and go 
to bed to the ringing of a bell, and say the Lord's 
prayer in unison. And they run away when they can 
get a chance, and steal, and swear, and cheat, and 
prowl, and indulge in obscene talk, as of old. I know 
of other public institutions of this kind, or, at least, one 
other, that has no rule of action except the general 
Christian rule within it. The Children are taught to do 
right. They are instructed in that which is right. 
Their sense of that which is true and good and pure 
and right and proper is educated, developed, stimulated, 
and thus are the childen taught to govern themselves. 
They govern themselves while in the institution, and 
they govern themselves after they leave it. It is im- 
possible to reform a vicious child without patiently 
teaching that child self-government. All the drill of all 
the masters and all the reformers in the world will not 
reform a single vice of a single child ; and this show of 
juvenile drill that we meet with in schools and charit- 
able institutions is frequently — nay, I will say, general- 
ly — a most deceitful thing — the specious cover of a 
system of training that is terribly worse than useless. 
If dogs could talk, they could be taught to do the same 
things in the same way ; but they would hunt cats and 



22 Letters to the Jonefes. 

bark at passengers in the old fashion when beyond the 
reach of their master's lash. 

You will see, Deacon Jones, that your mode of 
family training has introduced me to a field of discus- 
sion as wide as it is important. It relates to public 
institutions as well as to families, and to nations as 
well as to public institutions. You and I, and all the 
democrats of America, have been indulging in dreams 
of democracy in Europe, but these dreams do not come 
to pass, and are not likely to be realized at all. The 
people of Europe have been governed. They know 
nothing about self-government, and, whenever they 
have tried the experiment, they have sadly failed. 
That which alone imperils democracy in this country is 
the loss of the power of self-government, and that 
which alone prevents the establishment of democracy 
in Europe is the lack of that power. The governing 
classes of Europe will take good care to see that that 
power be not developed. 

But I return to this matter of family government, 
and I imagine that, before this time, you have asked 
me whether I have intended to sneer at orderly fami- 
lies. I answer — not at all. There must be, without 
question, more or less repression of the irregularities 
of young life, and of such rough passions as sometimes 
break out and gain ascendency in certain natures ; but 
this should be exceptional. I do not sneer at orderly 



To Deacon Solomon Jones. 23 

families, but I like to see order growing out of each 
member's sense of propriety, and each member's desire 
to contribute to the general good conduct and harmony 
of the family life. I like to see each child gradually 
transformed into a gentleman or a lady, with gentle- 
manly or ladylike habits, through a cultivated sense 
of that which is proper, and good. I know that 
children thus bred — taught from the beginning that 
they have a stake and a responsibility in the family 
life — used from the beginning to manage themselves — 
are prepared to go out into the world and take care 
of themselves. I To them, home is a place of dignity, 
and they will never disgrace it. To them, liberty is 
no new possession, and they know how to use with- 
out abusing it. To them, self-control is a habit, and 
they never lose it. 

Do you know what a child is, Deacon Jones ? Did 
you ever think whence it came and whither it is go- 
ing ? Did it ever occur to you that any one of your 
children is a good deal more God's child that it is yours ? 
Did you ever happen to think that it came from hea- 
ven, and that it is more your brother than your child ? 
Never, I venture to say. You never dream that your 
children are your younger brothers and sisters, intrust- 
ed to you by your common Father, for the purposes 
of protection and education ; and you certainly never 
treat them as if they were. You have not a child in 



24 Letters to the Jonefes. 

the world whose pardon you should not ask for the 
impudent and most unbrotherly assumptions which 
you have practiced upon him. Ah, if you could have 
looked upon your sons as your younger brothers and 
your daughters as your younger sisters, and patiently 
borne with them and instructed them in the use of life 
and liberty, and built them up into a self-regulated 
manhood and womanhood, you would not now be alone 
and comfortless. A child is not a horse or a dog, to 
be controlled by a walking stick or a whip, under all 
circumstances. There are some children that, like 
some dogs and horses, have vicious tendencies that 
can only be repressed by the infliction of pain, but a 
child is not a brute, and is not to be governed like a 
brute. A child is a young man or a young woman, 
possessing man's or woman's faculties in miniature, and 
is just as sensitive to insult and injury and injustice as 
in after years. You have insulted your children. You 
have treated them unreasonably, and you ought not to 
complain if they hold you in dislike and revengeful 
contempt. 

You never did anything to make your children love 
you, and you cannot but be aware that the moment 
that they were removed from your authority, you lost 
all influence over them. Why could you not reclaim 
that boy of yours, who madly became a debauchee, 
and disgraced your home, and tortured your heart? 



To Deacon Solomon Jones. 25 

Because you had never made him love you, or given 
him better motives for self-restraint than your own 
arbitrary will. He had been governed from the out- 
side, and never from the inside ; and when the outside 
authority was gone, there was nothing left upon which 
you had power to lay your hand. Why did your daugh- 
ter elope with one who was not worthy of her ? She 
did it simply because she found a man who loved her, 
and gave her the consideration due her as a woman — a 
love and a consideration which she had never found at 
home, where she was regarded by you as the dependent 
servant of your will. She was nothing at home ; and, 
badly as she married, she is a better and a freer and 
a happier woman than she would have been had she 
continued with you. I wish to impress upon you the 
conviction that these children of yours went astray, 
not in spite of your mode of family training, but in 
consequence of it. If I should wish to ruin my family, 
I would pursue your policy, and be measurably sure 
of the desired result. 

It is not pleasant for me to tell you these things, 
but I am writing for the public, and can have no choice. 
I tell you, and all who read these words, that, if you 
do not get the hearts of your children, and build them 
up in the right use of a liberty which is no more theirs 
after they leave your roof than it is before, you will be 
to them forever as heathen men and publicans. If 



26 Letters to the Jonefes. 

they take the determination to go to destruction, they 
will go, and you cannot save them. ( A child must have 
freedom, within limits which a variety of circumstances 
must define, and be taught how to use it, and made 
responsible for the right «use of it; \ It is in this way 
that self-government is taught, and in this thing that 
self-government consists. All children, on arriving at 
manhood and womanhood, should be the self-governed 
companions and friends of their parents, and on going 
out into the world, or losing parental control, should 
not feel the transition in the slightest degree. No child 
is trained in the right way who feels, when he steps 
forth from the family threshold — an independent actor 
— any less restraint than he felt the hour before. If 
he does, he is in danger of falling before the first 
temptation that assails him. 



THE SECOND LETTER. 

€a ftrs. fferiljH gones (Wilt of gmon gohrotmt). 

CONCERNING HER SYSTEM OF FAMILY GOVERNMENT. 

I SUPPOSE I have thought of you ten thousand 
times within the last twenty years. I never see 
a clean kitchen, or a trim and tidy housewife, or an 
irreproachahle " dresser," with its shining rows of 
tin and pewter, or a dairy full of milk, or a cleanly 
raked chip-yard, or polished brass andirons, flaming 
with fire on one side and reflecting ugly faces on the 
other, or catch a certain savory scent of breakfast on 
a frosty morning, or see a number of children crowded 
out of a door on their way to school, without thinking 
of you. Thriving, busy, exact, scrupulous, neat, minute 
in your supervision of all family concerns, striving to 
have your own way without interfering with the dea- 
con's, you have always lingered in my memory as a 



28 Letters to the Jonefes. 



remarkable woman. You sat up so late at night and 
rose so early in the morning, that it seemed as if you 
never slept. There was a chronic alertness about you 
that detected and even anticipated every occurrence in 
and around the house. Not a door could be opened 
or a window raised in any part of the house, however 
distant it might be, without your hearing and identify- 
ing it. Not a voice was heard within the house at any 
time of the day or night that you did not know who 
uttered it. Your soul seemed to have become the 
tenant of the whole building, and to be conscious of 
every occurrence in every part of it at every moment. 
You not only knew what was going on everywhere, 
but every part spoke of your presence. 

It was a curious way you had of maintaining the 
family harmony without the sacrifice of your own 
sense of independence. You really carried on a very 
independent life within certain limits. You were aware 
that, in the matter of will, the deacon, your husband, 
was very obstinate, and that you could never hope to 
dispute his empire. So you shrewdly managed never 
to cross him where the course of his will ran strongest, 
and to be sure that no one else crossed him. I remem- 
ber very well your look of amazement and reproof 
when you heard me treat with apparent irreverence 
some of his most rigidly fixed opinions, and assail 
prejudices which you knew were as deeply seated as 



To Mrs. Martha Jones. 29 

his life. I enjoyed your look of amazement quite as 
much as I did the deacon's anger, for it seemed to me 
a very justifiable bit of mischief to break into a family 
peace that was maintained in this way. By humoring 
and indulging your husband, in all matters over which 
he saw fit to exercise authority, and by so closely 
attending to everything else that he did not think of 
it, you kept him in a state of self-complacency, and 
were the recognized queen of a wide realm. 

As I look back upon your life, I find but little to 
blame you for. Wherever your errors have been pro- 
ductive of mischief, they have been errors of ignorance 
— mistakes — possibly excusable in the circumstances 
under which they were committed. You loved your 
children with all the tenderness and devotion of a good 
mother, but, in your anxiety that they should not cross 
their father's will, and provoke his displeasure, you 
became but little better than an irksome overseer to 
them. You knew that if there was anything that your 
husband insisted on, it was parental authority. You 
knew that the strict ordering of his family was his pet 
idea, and that family government, in the fullest mean- 
ing and force of the phrase, was his hobby. This pet 
idea — this hobby — you made room for in your family 
plans. You knew that he was often unreasonable, but 
that made no difference. You knew that his will ran 
strongest in that direction, and you made it your busi- 



30 Letters to the Jonefes. 

ness to see that as few obstacles lay in its path as pos« 
sible. On one side stood the deacon's inexorable laws 
and rules and will, by which his children, of every age, 
were to square their conduct. On the other stood those 
precious children of yours, with all the wilfulness and 
waywardness of children — with all their longing for 
parental tenderness and indulgence— with moods which 
they had never learned to manage, and tempers which 
they did not know the meaning of ; and you became 
supremely anxious that the deacon should not be pro- 
voked by them to wrath, and that they should escape 
the consequences of his displeasure. 

Well, what was the consequence ? This ceaseless 
vigilance which you had learned to exercise over every 
portion of the household economy, you extended to the 
bearing and conduct of your children. You exercised 
over them the strictest surveillance. You carried in 
your mind and in your manners the dread of a collision 
between them and their despotic governor. You tried 
to save him from irritation and them from its conse- 
quences. You kept one eye on him and another on 
them, and nothing in the conduct of either party 
escaped you. Your children, as they emerged from 
babyhood, grew gradually into the consciousness that 
they were watched, and that not a word could be 
uttered, or a hand lifted, or a foot moved, without a 
degree of notice which curtailed its liberty. It was 



To Mrs. Martha Jones. 31 

repression — repression — nothing bnt repression — every- 
where, for them. No hearty laugh, or overflowing, 
childish glee, or noisy play for them, for fear that the 
deacon might be disturbed. 

At last, every child you had, in addition to the fear 
of its father, came to entertain a dread of its mother. 
I think your children loved you, or would have loved 
you, had they not associated you forever with restraint. 
If they played, you were near with your everlasting 
" hush ! " If they sat down at table, they knew that 
your eye was upon them — that you watched the position 
of every head under the deacon's long " grace " — the 
passage of every mouthful — the manner in which they 
asked every question and resp onded to what was said 
to them — the amount of food and drink consumed — 
everything. They felt themselves wrapped up in — de- 
voured by — a vigilant supervision that took from them 
their liberty and their will, and with them, all feelings 
of self-respect and self-possession. 

It is not the opinion of your neighbors that either 
your husband or yourself has had anything to do with 
the ruin of your children. The deacon was so strict 
and so efficient in his family government, and you were 
so scrupulously careful in everything that related to 
their manners at home and away, that they did not 
imagine it possible that any bad result could naturally 
flow from such training. I do not say that they are 



32 Letters to the Jonefes. 

mistaken from any wish to blame yon, bnt I mnst tell 
you the truth. Your minute watchfulness and censor- 
ship exercised over these children until you became 
to them God, conscience^and will, were just as fatal 
to a manly and womanly development as the deacon's 
irresponsible commands. A boy that feels that every 
word of his mouth and every movement of his body is 
watched by one whose eye never sleeps, and whose 
hand is ever ready to repress, becomes at last a 
coward or a bully. There are natures that will not 
submit to this surveillance ; and when these become 
weary of the pressure, they kick it aside, and parental 
restraint — associated with all that is hateful in slavery 
— is gone forever. 

Under the peculiar training and home influences to 
which your children were subjected, there were but 
two things that they were likely to become, viz. : 
rebels or cravens. Your children were naturally high- 
spirited, like the deacon and yourself, and they became 
rebels. Otherwise, they would have carried with them 
through life the feeling that whatever show they might 
put on — however much they. might struggle against it — 
they were underlings. There are some men and some 
women, probably, who, living through a long life 
under favorable circumstances, recover from this early 
discipline of repression, and this abject slavery of the 
will, but they are few. They must be few. The 



To Mrs. Martha Jones. 33 

negro who has once been a slave cannot, one time in 
ten, refuse to take off his hat or bow to a white man. 
He is never at home, when placed on an equality with 
him. He carries in his soul the badge of servility, and 
he can no more thrust it from his sight or banish it 
from his consciousness than he can change the color 
of his skin. This is not because he is a negro, simply, 
but because he has been a slave — because he has been 
trained up to have no will, and to be controlled under 
all circumstances by the wills of those who had him 
in their power. 

A child can be made the slave of a parent just as 
thoroughly as a negro ever was made the slave of a 
white man, and such a child can be just as everlastingly 
damaged by parental or family slavery, as a bondman 
can be by any system of bondage. A child can be made 
as mean, and cowardly, and deceitful, and devoid of 
self-respect, by a system of management which puts 
a curb upon every action, as the devil himself could 
possibly desire. This system of watchful repression, 
and minute supervision, and criticism of every 
action, among children, is utterly debilitating and 
demoralizing. You intended no harm by it, madam. 
Under the circumstances, it was a very natural thing for 
you to do ; but I think you can hardly fail to see that, 
unwittingly, you perfected the work of destruction in 
your children which the deacon so thoroughly began, 

2* 



34 Letters to the Jonefes. 

and for which he would have been, without your 
assistance, entirely sufficient. 

Oh ! when will the world learn that children are 
neither animals nor slaves ? When will the world 
learn that children — the purest, sweetest, noblest, 
truest, most sagacious creatures in the world — with a 
natural charter of liberty as broad as that enjoyed by 
the angels — should be treated with respect ? When 
shall this idea that all legitimate training relates to 
the use of liberty — to the acquisition of the power of 
self-government — become the universal basis of family 
policy ? 

You ask me what I really mean by all this, for you 
are a practical woman, and are not to be taken in by 
a set of easily written phrases. Well, I will try to 
explain, or illustrate, my meaning. I remember a 
gathering at your house — a party of friends — to which 
your children were admitted; and I remember with 
painful distinctness the telegraphic communication 
which you maintained with them during the whole 
evening. If James got his legs crossed, or, in his 
drowsiness, gaped, or if he coughed, or sneezed, or 
laughed above a certain key, or make a remark, or 
moved his chair, it was : " James, h — m ! " — " James, 
h-'-m ! " " James, h — m ! " And James was only one 
of half a dozen whom you treated in the same way. 
You began the evening with the feeling that you were 



To Mrs. Martha Jones. 35 

entirely responsible for the behavior of those chil- 
dren — just as much responsible as if they severally 
were the fingers of your hand. You acted as if they 
were machines which, for the evening, you had under- 
taken to operate ? They felt that they were undei 
the eye of a vigilant keeper, and they did not dream 
of such a thing as acting for themselves. They were 
acting for you, and they did not know until they heard 
your suggestive." h— m ! " whether they were right or 
wrong. You undertook for the evening to be to them 
in the stead of their sense of propriety ; and the com- 
munication between them and you being imperfect, 
they often offended. I know that your own good 
sense will tell you now that this is not the way gentle- 
men and ladies are made. 

I was recently in a family circle where I witnessed 
a most delightful contrast to all this — where the sons 
and daughters were brought up and introduced to me 
by the father and mother with as much politeness and 
cordiality as if they were kings and queens every one, 
and with as much freedom as if the parents had not 
the slightest doubt that the children — from the oldest 
to the youngest — would bear themselves like ladies 
and gentlemen. There was no forwardness on the 
part of these children, as you may possibly suppose ; 
yet there was perfect self-possession ; and each child 
knew that he stood upon his own merits. I suppose 



36 Letters to the Jonefes. 

that if any one of these children had indulged in any 
impropriety during this interview — as not one of them 
did — he would have been kindly told afterward, by one 
of the parents, what he had done, and why he should 
never repeat it. Your children (pardon me for saying 
it) were always awkward in company, and for the 
simple reason that they did not know whether they 
Were pleasing you or not. They had no freedom, and 
were guided by no principle. Your will was their rule, 
and your will, so far as it related to all the minutiae of 
behavior, was not thoroughly known ; so they were 
always embarrassed, and always turning their eyes 
toward you. Your entire system of management was 
based on distrust, while that of the family with which 
I contrast yours was founded on trust. Your children, 
while you could possibly keep your hold upon them, 
were never permitted to outgrow their petticoats, 
while those of the other family alluded to were put 
upon their own responsibility just as soon as possible. 
Is there any doubt as to which system of treatment 
is best ? 

Perhaps you, and many others who read this letter, 
think that parental authority cannot be maintained 
without its constant and direct assertion. If so, then 
you and they are mistaken. I have known families 
that possessed fathers and mothers who were honored, 
admired, loved, almost worshiped — fathers and motliera 



To Mrs. Martha Jones. 



37 



■whose children dreaded nothing so much as to give 
them pain — yet these same children knew no such word 
as fear, and would have been utterly ashamed to render 
the assertion of parental authority necessary. Parents 
and children were friends and companions — the children 
deferring to the wishes and opinions of the parents, 
and the parents consulting the happiness and trusting 
the good sense and good intentions of the children. 
Whenever I hear a young man calling his father " the 
old man," and his mother " the old woman," I know 
that the old man and the old woman are to blame 
for it. 

If your children had turned out well, it must have 
been in spite of a system of training which .was so far 
from being education as to be its opposite. There was 
no inner life organized ; there was no building up of 
character ; there was no establishment in each child's 
heart of a bar of judgment — no exercise in the use 
of liberty ; but only restraint, only fear, only slavery. 

I do not entertain those opinions of one variety of 
disorderly families, which you and the deacon seem to 
have entertained all your lives. I have never yet seen 
the house where children were happy that did not 
show evidences of disorder ; and a man is a fool, or 
something worse, who quarrels with this state of 
things. Where children have playthings, and where 
they play with them, there must necessarily be disorder, 



38 Letters to the Jonefes. 

and furniture more or less disturbed and defaced, and 
noise more or less disagreeable, and litter that is not 
highly ornamental. And before children have had an 
opportunity to learn propriety of speech and deport- 
ment — before they are educated — there will be in their 
conduct — in playroom and parlor alike — -more or less 
of irregularity and extravagance. Remarks will be 
made that will shock all hearers ; laughs too boisterous 
to be musical will be indulged in ; sudden explosions 
of anger will occur, with other eccentricities of conduct 
that need not be named. There are remedies for all 
these — in time. When, in the course of their educa- 
tion, the sense of propriety is stimulated and strength- 
ened, and pride of character is developed, these irreg- 
ularities will disappear, and an orderly family will be 
the consequence, each child having become its own 
reformer. 

There was a feature of your family government 
(which you held in common with your husband) that 
made still more complete the slavery of your children. 
It was the deacon's opinion, you will remember, that a 
boy who was not too tired to play at ball, or slide 
down hill, or skate, was not too tired to saw wood, and 
it was his policy to direct all the excess of animal life 
which his boys manifested into the channels of industry 
and usefulness. You seconded this opinion, and main- 
tained that a girl who was not too sleepy to make a 



To Mrs. Martha Jones. 39 

doll's hat, or a doll's dress, was not too sleepy to hem 
a handkerchief, or darn a stocking. So your children 
never had what children call " a good time." Always 
kept at work when possible, and always restrained in 
every exhibition of the spirit of play, home became an 
irksome place to them, and childhood a dreary period. 
Your children were never permitted to do anything to 
please themselves in their own way. Everything was 
done — or you insisted that everything should be done 
— to please you, in your way. If one of your daugh- 
ters sat down to rest, or resorted to a little quiet amuse- 
ment, you stirred her at once by some petty command. 
I was often tempted to be angry with you because 
you would never give your children any peace. You 
had always something for them to do, and something 
that had to be done just at the very time when they 
were enjoying themselves the best. 

" Precept upon precept " is very well, in its way, 
but principle is much better. The principle of right 
and proper acting, fully inculcated, renders unnecessary 
all precepts ; and until a child has fully received this 
principle he is without the basis of manhood. The 
earlier this principle is received and a child thrown 
upon his own responsibility, and made to feel that he 
is a man, lacking only years to give him strength and 
wisdom, the safer that boy is for time and for eternity. 
The moment a boy becomes morally responsible, he 



4:0 Letters to the Jonefes. 



becomes in a most important sense — a sense which 
you and the deacon never recognized — free. I do not 
say that he is removed from parental control or 
rational restraint, but that it is the business of the 
parent to educate him in the principle of self-govern- 
ment. A boy bred thus, becomes ten times more a 
man than a boy bred in the way which has seemed 
best to you ; and when he goes forth from the parental 
roof he goes forth strong, and able to battle with life's 
trials and temptations. Children long for recognition 
— to do things "for themselves — to be their own masters 
and mistresses. Their play is all based on the assump- 
tion that they are men and women, as, in miniature, 
they are ; and, insisting on the right use of liberty, 
and teaching them how to use it, they should have it, 
restrained only when that liberty is abused. 



THE THIRD LETTER. 

$a <Jf. JJfcntotajjw Joito, Singing faster. 

CONCERNING TEE INFLUENCE OF HIS PROFESSION ON PER- 
SONAL CHARACTER. 

I ONCE heard the most renowned and venerable of 
all the professors of music in this country say 
that he always warned his classes of young wolnen to 
beware of singing men, and, with equal emphasis, warned 
his classes of young men to beware of singing women. 
He alluded, of course, to professional singers, and I have 
too much respect for his Christian character to suppose 
that he was not thoroughly in earnest. The statement 
will not flatter your self-conceit, but I immediately 
thought of you, and the life you have led. You were 
what people called a bright boy. Indeed, you were 
what I should call a clever boy. You were quick, inge- 
nious, graceful, skilful; and your father and mother 
told me, with evident pride, and in your presence, 



42 Letters to the Jonefes. 

that you had a remarkable talent for music. " Felix 
Mendelssohn could sing," they said, " and carry his 
own part, before he was three years old." And Felix 
Mendelssohn was brought out on all possible occasions, 
to display his really respectable gifts as a singer, and 
was brought out so often, and was so much praised 
and flattered, that, before he was old enough to know 
much about anything, he had conceived the idea that 
singing was the largest thing to be done in this world, 
and that Felix Mendelssohn Jones had a very large 
way of doing it. 

Twenty years have passed away, and where and 
what are you ? You are a singing master, with a lim- 
ited income, and a reputation rather the worse for 
wear. You have never been convicted of any flagrant 
acts of immorality, but men and women have ticket- 
ed you " doubtful." Careful fathers and mothers are 
careful not to leave their daughters in your company. 
Ladies who prize a good name above all other posses- 
sions never permit themselves to be found alone with 
you. There are stories floating about concerning your 
intrigues, and the jealousy and unhappiness of your 
wife. Everybody says you are an excellent singer, 
that you understand your business, &c, &c, but all 
add that you know nothing about anything else, that 
they would not trust you the length of their arms, that 
you are a hypocrite and a scapegrace, that you ought 



To F. Mendelffohn Jones. 43 

to be horsewhipped and hissed out of decent society, 
that it is strange that any respectable man will have 
you in his family, and a great many other ugly things 
which need not be related. I am aware that you have 
warm friends, but not one among the men, unless it be 
some poor fellow whose wife's name has been coupled 
with yours in an uncomfortable way. Wherever you 
go, there are always two or three women who become 
your sworn partisans — women who have your name 
constantly on their lips — who will not peaceably or 
without protest hear your immaculateness called in 
question — women who, somehow, seem to have a per- 
sonal interest is establishing the uncompromising rigid- 
ity of your virtue. I do not think very highly of 
these women. 

You are a handsome man, and how well you know 
it ! You are a " dressy " man. There is no better 
broadcloth than you wear, and no better tailor than 
you employ. You are as vain as a peacock, and selfish 
beyond all calculation. A stranger, meeting you in a 
railroad car, or at a hotel, would not guess the manner 
in which you get your money, and least of all would 
he gues?« that in your home, where you are a contempt- 
ible tyrant, your wife sits meanly clad, and your chil- 
dren eat the bread of poverty. 

I have asked myself a thousand times why it is 
that you and a large class of singing men and singing 



44 Letters to the Jonefes. 

women are thus among the most worthless of all 
human beings. One would suppose, from the nature 
of the case, that you and they would be among the 
purest and noblest and best men and women in the 
world. Music is a creature of the skies. It was on 
the wings of music that the heaven-born song — " Peace 
on earth : good will to men " — came down, and thrilled 
Judea with sounds that have since swept around the 
world. It is on the breath of music that our praises 
rise to Him whose life itself, as expressed in the move- 
ments of systems and the phenomena of vitality, is the 
perfection of rhythmical harmony. It is music that lulls 
the fretful infant to sleep upon its mother's bosom, 
that gives expression to the free spirit of boyhood 
when it rejoices upon the hills, that relieves the tedium 
of labor, that clothes the phrases by which men woo 
the women whom they love, and that makes a flowery 
channel through which grief may pour its plaint. It 
stirs the martial host to do battle in the cause of God 
and freedom, and celebrates the victory ; and " with 
songs " as well as with " everlasting joy," we are told, 
the redeemed shall enter upon their reward at last. 
Why,' one would suppose that no man could live and 
move and have his being in music, without being sub- 
limated — etherealized — spiritualized by it — kept up id 
a seventh heaven of purity and refinement. 

This may all be said of music in general, but to me 



To F. MendellTohn Jones. 45 

there seems to be something peculiarly sacred in the 
human voice. There is that in the voice which trans- , 
cends all the instruments of man's invention. It is one j 
of God's instruments, and cannot be surpassed or equal- 
led. It is the natural outlet of human passion — the 
opening through which — in love and hate, in grief and 
gladness, in desire and satisfaction — the soul breathes. 
It pulsates and trembles with that spiritual life and 
motion which are born of God's presence in the soul. 
It is not only the expression of all that is human in us, 
but of all that is divine. 

One would suppose, I repeat, from the nature of 
the case, that you and all the professional singing men 
and singing women would be among the purest and 
noblest and best men and women in the world, but 
you and they are notoriously no such thing. On the 
contrary, you are the mean and miserable profligate I 
have already charged you with being, and many of 
your associates are like you. In saying this, I do not 
mean to wound the sensibilities of some singing men 
and women who do not belong in your set. I know 
truly Christian men and women who have devoted 
their lives to music, but they are in no danger ot being 
confounded with your crowd and class. They despise 
you as much as I do, and regret as much as I do tne 
facts which have associated music with so much that 
is mean and unworthy in character and conduct. 



46 Letters to the Jonefes. 

It may be interesting to the public, if not to yon, 
to study into the causes of this wide-spread immorality 
and worthlessness among those who make singing the 
business of their lives. In your case, and in many 
others, personal vanity has had more to do than anything 
else. You were bred from the cradle to a love of 
praise. Your gift for music was manifested early, and 
your parents undertook to exhibit you and secure 
praise for you throughout all the years of your boy- 
hood. You grew up with a constant greed for admira- 
tion, and this grew at last into a passion, which has 
never relinquished its hold upon you. You became 
vain of your accomplishment, and vain of your personal 
beauty, and vain of your whole personality. You 
have been singing in church all your life, and giving 
voice to the aspirations and praises of others, but, prob- 
ably, there has never, in all that time, gone up from 
your heart a single offering to Him who bestowed upon 
you your excellent gift. You have, duringall your life, 
on all occasions, sung to men, and not to God. As 
your voice has swelled out over choir and congregation, 
you have been only thoughtful of the admiration you 
were exciting in the minds of those who were listen- 
ing, and have always been rather seeking praise for 
yourself than giving praise to your Maker. 

This love of admiration and praise has been, then, 
the mainspring of your life ; and no man or woman 



To F. MendelfTohn Jones. 



47 



can be even decent with no higher motive of life than 
this. With this motive predominant, you have grown 
superlatively selfish. You refuse to share your earnings 
with your wife and children, because such a policy 
would detract from your personal charms, or your per- 
sonal comforts. You quarrel with every man of your 
profession, because you are afraid that he will detract 
somewhat from the glory which you imagine has settled 
around you. Your mouth is constantly filled with 
detraction of your rivals. In the practice of your pro- 
fession, you are thrown into contact with soft and sym- 
pathetic women, who are charmed by your voice, and 
your face, and your style, and your villainously smooth 
and sanctimonious manners, and they become easy 
victims to your desire for personal conquest. Thus 
has musie become to you only an instrument for the 
gratification of your greed for admiration, and, among 
other things, a means for winning personal power 
over the weak and wayward women whom you 
encounter. 

Life always takes on the character of its motive. It 
is not the music which has injured you : it is not the 
music which injures any one of the great brotherhood 
and sisterhood of vicious genius. There are those 
among musicians who can plead the power of great 
passions as their apology for great vices. No great 
musician is possible without great passions. No man 



48 



Letters to the Jonefes. 



without intense human sympathies in all directions can 
ever be a great singer, or a great musician of any kind ; 
and these sympathies, in a life subject to great exalta- 
tions and depressions, lead their possessor only too often 
into vices that degrade him and his art. But you are 
not a great musician, and I doubt very much whether 
you have great passions. I think you are a diddler 
and a make-believe. I think your vices are affectations, 
in a considerable degree, and that you indulge in them 
only so far as you imagine they will make you inter- 
esting. 

There is something very demoralizing in all pursuits 
that depend for their success upon the popular 
applause. We see it no more in public singing than 
in acting, and no more in acting than in politics. 
I doubt whether more singers than politicians are 
ruined by the character of their pursuits. A man who 
makes it the business of his life to seek office at the 
hands of the people, and who administers the affairs of 
office so as to secure the popular applause, becomes 
morally as rotten as the rottenest of your profession. 

I never hear of an American girl going abroad to 
study music, for the purpose of fitting herself for a 
public musical career, without a pang. A musical 
education, an introduction to public musical life, and a 
few years of that life, are almost certain ruin for any 
woman. Some escape this ruin, it is true, but there 



To F. Mendelffohn Jones. 49 

are temptations laid for every step of their life. They 
find their success in the hands of men who demand 
more than money for wages. They find their personal 
charms set over against the personal charms of others. 
Their whole life is filled with rivalries and jealousies. 
They find themselves constantly thrown into intimate 
association on the stage with men who subject them- 
selves to no Christian restraint — who can hardly be 
said to have had a Christian education. They are con- 
stantly acting in operas the whole dramatic relish of 
which is found in equivocal situations, or openly licen- 
tious revelations. In such circumstances as these, a 
woman must be a marvel of modesty and a miracle of 
grace to escape contamination. I do not believe there 
is a woman in the world who ever came out of a public 
musical career as good a woman as she entered it. She 
may have escaped with an untarnished name — she may 
have preserved her standing in society, or even height- 
ened it, but in her inmost soul she knows that the 
pure spirit of her girlhood is gone. 

It is the dream, I suppose, of most women who 
undertake a musical career, that, after winning money 
and fame, they shall settle doAvn into domestic life 
gracefully, and be happy in retirement. Alas! this 
is one of the dreams that very rarely " come true." 
The greed for popular applause, once tasted, knows no 
relenting. The public life of women unfits them for 



50 Letters to the Jonefes. 

domestic life, and the contaminations of a public sing- 
ing woman's position render it almost impossible for 
her to be married out of her circle ; so that a woman 
who spends ten years on the stage usually spends her 
life there, or does worse. I do not wonder at the old 
professor's warning against singing women, or singing 
men. It is enough to break down any man's or wo- 
man's self-respect to be dependent for bread and repu- 
tation upon the applause of a capricious public — to 
devote the whole energies of one's being to the winning 
of a few clappings of the hand and a few tosses of the 
handkerchief, and to feel that bread, and success of the 
life-purpose, depend on these few clappings and tosses. 
I have a theory that it is demoralizing to pursue, 
as a business, any graceful accomplishment which was 
only intended to minister to the pleasure and recreation 
of toiling men and women. I have not read history 
correctly if it be not true that the artists of all ages 
have been generally men of many vices. There have 
been men of pure character among them always, but, 
as a class, they have not been men whom we should 
select for Sunday school superintendents, or as husbands 
for our daughters. If you, Felix Mendelssohn Jones, 
had been a tailor, and had worked hard at your busi- 
ness, and only used your talent for music in the social 
circle and the village choir on Sunday, and been just as 
vain as you are to-day, you would have been a better 



To F. Mendelffohn Jones. 51 

man than you are now, I think. I think this devotion 
of your life to music has had the tendency, independ- 
ently of all other influences, to make you intellectually 
an ass and morally a goat. 

Whether there is soundness in this theory or not, 
singing as a pursuit must come under the general law 
which makes devotion to one idea a dwarfing process. 
A man who gives his life to music — who becomes 
absorbed by it — and who really knows nothing else, 
will necessarily be a very small specimen of a man. 
The artist is developed at the expense of the man. 
Music is thrown entirely out of its legitimate and 
healthy relations to his life, and he makes that an 
object and end of life which should only minister to an 
end far higher. When a man undertakes to clothe his 
manhood from materials furnished by a single pursuit, 
even when that pursuit is so pure and beautiful as that 
of music, he runs short of cloth at once. I have no 
doubt that one of the principal reasons why music has 
such a dwarfing effect upon a multitude of those who 
make it the- pursuit of their lives, is, that it is so fasci- 
nating and so absorbing — because it possesses such a 
power to drive out from the mind and life everything 
else. VThere is no denying the fact that, in the eye of 
a practical business man, musical accomplishments in 
men are regarded as a damage to character and a 
hinderance to success.\ It is pretty nearly the universal 



52 Letters to the Jonefes. 



belief that a man who is very much devoted to 
music is rarely good for anything else. This may not 
be true— and I doubt whether it is strictly true — but 
it is true enough, and has always been true enough to 
make it a rule among those who have no time for nice 
distinctions and exceptional cases. 

I do not wonder, Felix Mendelssohn Jones, that 
intellectually you are a dwarf. I do not wonder that 
men who have nerve and muscle and common sense, 
and practical acquaintance with the great concerns of 
life, and a share in the world's earnest work, should 
hold you in contempt for other reasons than those which 
relate to your morals. What did you ever study 
besides music ? Upon what subject of human interest 
are you informed except music ? Upon what topic of 
conversation are you at all at home unless it be music ? 
Why is it that you have nothing to say when those 
questions are discussed which relate to the political, 
moral, social, and industrial life of the race or nation 
to which you belong ? No man has a right to be more 
a musician than a man, and no musician has a right to 
complain when men who are men hold him in contempt 
because he is the slave of an art of which he should 
rather be the kingly possessor. There is a vast deal of 
nonsense afloat in the world about being married to 
music, or married to art, as if music were a woman of 
a very seductive and exacting character, and musicians 



To F. Mendelffohn Jones. 53 

were very gallant and knightly people who make it 
their business to bend before a lifted eyebrow, and 
follow the fickle swing of petticoats to death and the 
worst that follows it. 

There is another cause that has operated to make 
you much less a man than you might have been under 
other circumstances, and this is almost inseparable 
from your life as a public singer. Your life has been 
a vagabond life. You, in your humble way, passing 
from village to village, have only had a taste of that 
dissipation of travel which the more famous members 
of your profession .are obliged to suffer. From the 
time a public singer begins his career until he closes it, 
he has no home. He is never recognized as a member 
of society. He is obliged to be all things to all men, 
everywhere. He has no nationality. He shouts for 
the stars and stripes in New York, but would just as 
easily shout for the stars and bars wherever they float. 
He is equally at home in England and France and 
Italy, and salutes any flag under which he can win 
plaudits and provender. He has no politics, he has no 
religion, "to mention," he has no stake in permanent 1 
society whatever. The institutions of Christianity, 
public schools, educational schemes and systems, the 
great, permanent charities, municipal and neighborhood 
life — he has no share in all these. He runs from coun- 
try to country and from capital to capital, or scours the 



54 Letters to the Jonefes. 

country, and does not cease his travels until life or 
health or voice is gone. It is impossible for any man 
to be subjected to such dissipation as this without 
receiving incalculable damage of character. He can 
think of nothing but his profession under these cir- 
cumstances. He can have no healthy social life, no 
home influences, no recognized position in religious and 
political communities. He can be nothing but a comet 
among the fixed stars and regularly revolving systems 
of the world, making a great show for the rather nebu- 
lous head which he carries, occupying more blue sky 
for a brief period than belongs "to him, and then passing 
out of sight and out of memory, leaving no track. 

I might go further, and show how nearly impossible 
it is for a public singer, who sings everything every- 
where, who wanders over the world and lives upon the 
breath of popular applause, whose life seems almost 
necessarily made up of intrigues and jealousies, to be a 
religious man. No matter what the stage of the theatre 
or the platform of the concert room might be, or may 
have been ; we know that uoav they are not the places 
where piety toward God is in such a state of high culti- 
vation that good people throng before them for reli- 
gious motive and inspiration. The whole atmosphere 
of a public singer's life is sensuous. Like the beggarly 
old reprobate in Rome who obtained a living by sitting 
to artists for his " religious expression," they coin their 



To F. Mendelffohn Jones. 55 

Te Derails into dollars, and regard a mass as only a 
style of music to be treated in a professional way for 
other people who have sufficient interest in it to pay 
for the service. IMan is a weak creature, and it takes 
a great many influences to keep him in the path of 
religious duty, and preserve his sympathy with those 
grand spiritual truths which relate to his noblest 
development and his highest destiny.") These influences 
are not to be secured by a roving life, and constantly 
shifting society, and ministering to the tastes and 
seeding the favor of the vulgar crowd. 

On the whole, Mr. Felix Mendelssohn Jones, I do 
not wonder that you are no better than you are. You 
have really had more influences operating against you 
than I had considered when I began to write this 
letter to you. Nevertheless, you .ought to be ashamed 
of yourself and institute a reform. Recast you life. 
If you cannot settle down permanently in your profes- 
sion in some town large enough to support you, and 
become a decent husband to your wife and father to 
your children, and take upon your shoulders your por- 
tion of the burdens of organized society, why, quit 
your profession, and go into some other business. I 
know you furnish a very slender basis for building a 
man upon, but you can at least cease to be a nuisance. 

I know a good many musical men and women whom 
music or devotion to music has not damaged ; but these 



56 Letters to the Jonefes. 

men and women have entered as permanent elements 
into the society in which they live, and are something 
more than musicians. Singing is the most charming of 
all accomplishments when it is the voice of a noble na- 
ture and a generous culture ; and all music, when it pre- 
serves its legitimate relations to the great interests of 
human society, is refining and liberalizing in its in- 
fluence. But when music monopolizes the mind of a 
man ; when it becomes the vehicle through which he 
ministers to his personal vanity ; when it either becomes 
degraded to be the instrument for procuring his bread, 
or elevated to the position of a master passion, it spoils 
him. I pray that no friend or child of mine may 
become professionally a singing man or singing 
woman. All the circumstances that cluster about such 
a life, all the influences associated with it, and the 
great majority of its natural tendencies are against the 
development and preservation of a Christian style of 
life and character, and, consequently, against the 
best form of happiness here and the only form 
hereafter. 



THE FOURTH LETTER. 

%a Starts Sfacjjs |flius, Shoemaker. 

CONCERNING HIS HABIT OF BUSINESS LYING. 

YOU have always seemed to me to be an anoma« 
Ions sort of personage. On the street, you are 
a respectable and decent man. I would take your note 
for any sum you would be likely to borrow, and rely 
upon its payment at maturity. Nay, I would accept 
your word of honor at any time, when your coat is on 
and the wax is off your fingers, with entire confidence. 
You have been intrusted with responsibilities in civil 
and social affairs, and have never betrayed them. You 
are a good husband, father, friend, and citizen, but you 
stand behind your counter from morning until night, and 
lie as continuously and coolly as if you were a flowing 
fountain of falsehood. You will not assail me in the 
street because I S€> plainly tell you this, for you know 



58 Letters to the Jonefes. 

it is true, and that I like you too well to insult you. You 
know that you never made a pair of boots for me that 
did not cost you more lies than they cost me dollars. 

I have stood before you, on some occasions, thor- 
oughly astonished at the facility and ingenuity and 
boldness with which you lied your way out from among 
the fragments of your broken engagements. The glib- 
ness of your tongue, and the candor of your tone, and 
the immovable sincerity of your features, and the half- 
discouraged, half-wounded expression of face and 
voice with which you apologized for your failure to 
keep your pledges, were really overwhelming. I have 
sometimes wondered whether you did not suppose you 
were telling the truth— whether you had not, by some 
odd hallucination, come to believe that the causes of 
your failure to keep your pledges had a real and per- 
manent existence. Never was so much sickness suffered 
by journeymen shoemakers as by yours. Never had 
shoemakers such sickly children, and never had shoe- 
makers so many children born to them. It is a strange 
fatality, too, that always keeps your best workmen on 
a spree. I have never known any class of artisans 
drink so much as those you employ. You are always 
getting out of the right kind of leather at the wrong 
time, or suffering by some occurrence that renders it 
impossible for you to keep your promise and, at the same 
time, make just such a pair of boots or shoes as you 



To Hans Sachs Jones. 59 

feel particular about making for your particular cus- 
tomers. You resort to the most transparent flattery to 
keep your patrons good-natured, but there is not a man 
or woman who enters your shop who believes a word 
you utter. Day after day, and week after week, youi 
promises are broken with regard to a single job, and 
your patrons smile in your face at the excuses which 
your tongue holds ready at all times ; and you know 
that they know you are lying. 

You are not a sinner in this respect above all shoe- 
makers, and shoemakers are not sinners in this respect 
above all artisans and tradesmen. You happen to be 
a very perfect specimen of a class of men who work 
for the public in the performance of essential every- 
day jobs in the various mechanical arts. They do not 
all lie as much as you do, but many of them lie in the 
same way, and for the same reason. They are not all 
as cool about it as you are, and most of them are much 
less fertile and skilful than you are, but lying is their 
daily resort. 

Now, what is there in your business, or in the rela- 
tions to society of that class of employments to which 
yours belongs, to develop the untruthfulness which all 
must admit attaches to it in some degree? In the 
first place, you began business in a very small way, 
and were able to keep your promises, never making 
any that you did not intend to keep. Business in- 



60 Letters to the Jonefes. 

creased, and you found among your best customers— 
those whose patronage you most desired to retain — a 
degree of unreasonable impatience which you could 
not withstand. You were imperiously urged into 
the making of pledges for the delivery of work 
which you could not make, consistently with your 
previously existing engagements. You were desirous 
to please ; strong wills, backed by money, were 
brought to bear upon you; the keeping of your 
promise looked possible, even if not altogether prac- 
ticable ; and you promised. You felt, however, that 
somebody was to be disappointed, and you undertook 
to find an excuse which would lift the burden of 
blame from your own shoulders. You did not dare 
to stand before your customer a voluntary delinquent ; 
so, when he came, and you were not ready to see him, 
you justified yourself by throwing the blame upon 
others, or upon circumstances over which you had no 
control. He may have believed you at first, but his 
faith in you soon wore out. 

You learned, at length, that people loved to have 
their work promised early, and that they would take 
your apologies for failure goodnaturedly ; and you 
ran into the habit of promising work early, with the 
expectation, if not the direct intention, to break your 
promise. I have given you jobs when I knew you 
lied while taking them, and expected to lie a great 



To Hans Sachs Jones. 



61 



many times before you finished them. You have told 
me repeatedly that work was nearly finished when I 
knew it had not been begun ; and all this for the 
purpose of pleasing me, and saving yourself from 
blame. You were not naturally untruthful, and you 
are not untruthful now where your business is not 
concerned, but in your business you have made false- 
hood the rule of your daily life. Your promises are 
always in advance of your" power to perform, and 
the breaking of them has become habitual. 

It is painful to see a man — otherwise so respect- 
able — unreliable in the place where men meet him 
most ; for it weakens his hold upon the popular regard, 
and cannot fail to depreciate his own self-respect. 
You must feel ashamed, at times, to realize that your 
word is not believed, and to know that you have not 
a customer in the world who feels at all sure about 
getting work done by you until it really is done and 
in his hands. The kind of life you lead must also be 
an exceedingly uncomfortable one. Now, my friend, 
there is not the slightest necessity for this, and there 
is no apology for it. It had a very natural beginning, 
but you ought to have learned long ago that it was 
not requisite either to your prosperity or your comfort. 
You get your work in spite of your lying, and not 
in consequence of it. That is the only thing people 
have against you. They give you their custom because 



62 Letters to the Jonefes. 

you are a good workman, and for nothing else ; and no 
man leaves your shop for another except for the reason 
that he cannot depend upon your word. You never 
made a dollar or saved a friend by all the lies you 
have told. Honesty, reliableness, truthfulness — these 
are at a premium in all the markets of the world ; and 
you have made yourself miserable and contemptible 
throughout your life for nothing. Tour business is 
always at loose ends, everybody is crowding you, 
many of them abuse you, and it all comes of your 
promising to do work before it is possible for you to 
do it. Not a decent man, whose custom is worth 
keeping, enters your shop who would not wait your 
time patiently, if he could rely upon having his job 
upon the day promised. 

I have no doubt that, as you read this letter, you 
say to yourself that I talk as if a man could always 
keep promises, honestly made, and as if there were 
men in the world who never break promises. £l know, 
indeed, that there is no man who can so thoroughly 
depend upon circumstances, or so control them, as 
always to be sure to keep his pledges^ Sickness 
happens to all. Calamity in some form comes to all. 
Drunkenness sometimes overtakes a journeyman shoe- 
maker, though, to tell the truth, such men are not corn* 
monly employed by masters who care about keeping 
their word. Men of business punctilio, and regular 



To Hans Sachs Jones. 



63 



business habits, can always secure the best workmen. 
It is only the unreliable masters who are obliged to ac- 
cept unreliable hands, though I would by no means inti- 
mate that I believe in your representations concerning 
the drunkenness of your workmen. Your men are shame- 
fully belied ; and if they knew how you slander them 
they would rebel. No, I admit that the most prompt 
and punctual men must fail, through unforeseen imped- 
iments, to keep all their promises ; but such men do not 
lie their way out of their difficulty, and are only the 
more careful about making and keeping their engage- 
ments afterward. 

To me, one of the most admirable things in the 
world is business punctilio. I think it is rare to find 
very bad men among thorough business men. I do 
not mean to say that a good business man is necessarily 
religious, or even necessarily without vices. I mean, 
simply, that it is difficult to be strictly honest in busi- 
ness, and sensitive in all matters pertaining to business 
engagements, and thoroughly punctual in the fulfil- 
ment of all business obligations, and at the same time 
to be loose in morals and dissipated in personal habits. 
I have great respect for those rigid laws of the count- 
ing room which regulate the dealings between man 
and man, and which make the counting room as exact 
in all matters of time and exchange as a banking house 
— which ignore friendship, affection, and all persona] 



64 Letters to the Jonefes. 

considerations whatsoever — which, place neighbors 
and brothers on the same platform with enemies 
and aliens, and which make an autocrat of an account- 
ant, who is, at the same time, strictly an obedient sub- 
ject of his own laws. I say it is hard for a man to 
enter as a perfectly harmonious element into this grand 
system of business, and submit himself to its rigid 
rules, and maintain his position in it with perfect 
integrity, and, at the same time, be a very bad man. 
To a certain' extent, he bows to and obeys a high 
standard of life. He may not always recognize fully 
the moral element which it embodies. He may take 
a selfish view of the whole matter ; but he cannot be 
entirely insensible to the principle of personal honor 
which it involves, or fail to be influenced by the per- 
sonal habits which it enforces. Some of the best 
business men I have ever known, have been the most 
charitable men I have ever known. Men who have 
acquired wealth by rigid adherence to business integ- 
rity, and who have sometimes been deemed harsh 
and hard by those with whom they have had business 
relations, have shown a liberality and a generosity 
toward objects of charity which have placed them 
among the world's benefactors. Men who have 
exacted the last fraction of a cent with one hand,, in 
the way of business, have disbursed thousands' of 
dollars with the other, in the way of charity. 



To Hans Sachs Jones. 



65 



On another side of this subject, it may be stated 
that it is not possible for a man to be careless in busi- 
ness affairs, or unmindful of his business obligations, 
without being weak or rotten in his personal character. 
Show me a man who never pays his notes when they 
are due, and who shuns the payment of his bills when 
it is possible, and does both these things as a habit, 
and I shall see a man whose moral character is, beyond 
all question, bad. We have had illustrious examples 
of this lack of business exactness. "We have had great 
men who were in the habit of borrowing money 
without repaying it, or apologizing for not repaying 
it. We have had great men whose business habits 
were simply scandalous — who never paid a bill unless 
urged and worried, and who expended for their per- 
sonal gratification every cent of money they could lay 
their hands upon. These delinquencies have been 
apologized for as among the eccentricities of genius, or 
as that -unmindfulness of small affairs which naturally 
attends all greatness of intellect and intellectual effort ; 
but the world has been too easy with them, altogether. 
I could name great men — and the names of some of 
them arise before the readers of this letter — who were 
atrociously dishonest. I do not care how great these 
men were. I do not care how many amiable and 
admirable traits they possessed. They were dishonest 
and untrustworthy men in their business relations, 



66 Letters to the Jonefes. 

and that simple fact condemns them. I am ready 
to believe anything bad of a man who habitually 
neglects to fulfil his business obligations. Such a 
man is certainly rotten at heart. He is not to be 
trusted with a public responsibility, or a rum bottle, 
or a woman. 

Now, Mr. Hans Sachs Jones, you have customers 
of this class. Will you permit me to ask you how 
you like them ? Some of these men are poor, but 
quite as many of them are rich. You lied to them 
a great many times before they made their little bills 
with you, and they have lied to you a great many 
times since. When you have had money to raise, 
they have promised to furnish it to you, and then they 
have failed to keep their pledges. Not unfrequently, 
when you have upbraided them for disappointing 
you, they have retorted by telling you that you made 
them wait for their work, and that it is perfectly 
proper that you should wait for your pay. Their 
reply was a fair one, so far as you Avere concerned. 
It was just as much a matter of business honor that 
you should keep your promises, as it was that they 
should keep theirs. It was just as wrong for you to 
promise your work before you could give it to them, 
as it was for your customers to promise to pay you 
before they could pay you, or before they intended 
to pay you. In your heart, you think these men are 



To Hans Sachs Jones. 67 

very mean, and in their hearts they think that you 
are just as mean as they are, and they are right. Their 
plea leaves yon defenceless, and they "banter and badger 
you until you become disgusted with your business 
and yourself. Oh ! if you had never given these 
customers of yours an advantage over you, by your 
constant failures to keep your word with them, you 
would be worth a good many more dollars to-day 
than you are. 

Then you should remember that you owe a debt 
of honor to your guild. A very admirable thing 
among tradesmen of the same class is that esprit de 
corps which enables them to join hands in a recognized 
community of honor and of interest, and to look upon 
their trade as the kind mother that feeds them and 
that deserves at their hands the treatment due from 
grateful and chivalrous sons. You have doubtless 
heard of associations of men engaged in much humbler 
employments than yours (humbler in the world's judg- 
ment), that really won the respect and admiration of 
the communities in which they lived — men who felt 
strengthened and ennobled by their association — men 
who came by their association to feel the slightest 
insult offered to their trade as a personal affront. I 
say that this esprit Se corps is a very admirable thing, 
and, further, that it gives, or may give, a true dignity 
to any honest calling under heaven. We do not have 



68 Letters to the Jonefes. 

so much of this in this country as we ought to have. 
All European countries are ahead of us in this matter, 
principally, perhaps, for the reason that in those coun- 
tries the acquisition and pursuit of trades are more 
particularly a matter of legal regulation. Here a man 
may set up a trade whether he ever learned it or not, 
and few learn their trades thoroughly It is more 
difficult, therefore, to secure community of feeling 
among those engaged in the same pursuits here than 
abroad ; but it is none the less desirable and necessary, 
that, among good workmen like yourself, there should 
be brotherhood of feeling and interest — pride and 
sympathy of guild. It would give you dignity, 
protection, respectability; and you would feel in 
all your business transactions that, however reckless 
you might be of disgrace to yourself, you have 
no right to disgrace your business, or your brother- 
hood. 

I repeat, then, that you owe a debt of honor to 
your guild. There are many men engaged in the 
same calling with you who scorn the petty arts of 
falsehood to which you resort. They are men of 
character — men who never make a promise which they 
do not intend to keep, and who faithfully and con- 
scientiously strive to keep every promise which they 
make. These are the men who give to your calling 
all the respectability which it possesses. All labor 



To Hans Sachs Jones.' 69 

of the Lands, pursued for bread, is honorable, and 
honorable alike. One trade is respectable above 
another only in consequence of the superior respecta- 
bility of the class of men engaging in it. Now you 
have a right, in a certain sense, to disgrace yourself 
but you have no right to disgrace your trade and 
your guild. Your devotion to this idea should be 
almost religious; for, in a certain degree, you have 
the reputation of. the whole class with which you are 
identified in interest in your keeping, and you are 
bound by every principle of justice and honor not to 
betray it. * • 

I have not appealed, in what I have said to you on 
this subject, to those higher motives of conduct which 
grow out of your relations to the God of truth, nor do 
I propose to. You know, just as well as I do, that 
your system of business lying is morally wrong. I 
simply wish, in closing this letter, to call your atten- 
tion to the fact that you have arrived at the point 
where your conscience ceases to trouble you. You 
do not use profane language. You are shocked when 
you hear others use it, but you are aware that many 
of your acquaintances swear from habit, and, by 
habitual swearing, have ceased to look upon their 
profanity as profanity. They take the names of God 
and Jesus Christ in vain, and call for curses upon the 
heads even of their friends, without a thought of sin, 



70 Letters to the Jonefes. 

and without a twinge of conscience. Over a certain 
region of their moral sense profanity has trampled, 
until it has trampled the life all out of it. So, over a 
certain region of your moral sense, these lies of yours 
have trod their daily course, until not a blade of grass 
or a flower is left to give token of life, or breathe 
complaint of the invaders. They have trampled out 
all sensibility, and you lie without feeling it ; and 
when you are detected and indignantly rebuked, as 
you sometimes are, you only feel your detection as 
an inconvenience, which might have been avoided by 
more ingenious lying. I beg you to discontinue this 
ruinous practice, and see if sensibility will not once 
more inform those functions of your moral nature 
which persistent abuse has indurated and rendered 
useless. 



THE FIFTH LETTER. 

%a (BbfrrHJA} |pa:gsort fortes. 

CONCERNING EIS FAILURE TO YIELD TO SIS CONVICTIONS. 
OF DUTY. 

AS I write your name, there comes before me the 
vision of a fair-haired, blue-eyed boy, who 
had been fed by smiles and pleasant words at home so 
constantly that his whole nature had been sweetened 
by them. I remember how you used to look up into 
my face for recognition and for the greeting and the 
smile which you had learned to crave and to expect of 
everybody. Into few faces did those expectant blue 
eyes look in vain, for you were a universal favorite. I 
remember that I was always so much impressed by 
your pure and precious nature that I could never 
resist the impulse to put my arm around you, and 
draw you to my heart. It was easy to love you, and 
sweet to be loved by you ; and those who knew your 



72 



Letters to the Jonefes. 



sainted mother knew why yon were what yon were 
in personal and spiritual loveliness. That mother has 
been dead a long time, but do yon not sometimes 
recall her reason for giving yon the name of Edward 
Payson ? Ah, yes ! I know that yon must sometimes 
remember that in her heart of hearts — even before yon 
were born — she dedicated yon to the service of the 
Saviour of men, and that she crowned yon with a name 
hallowed by a wide wealth of Christian associations, 
that she might be reminded of her gift whenever she 
pronounced it. The absorbing hope of her life was to 
see you in the pulpit, and to hear you preach the 
everlasting gospel. To compass this end, she would 
have been willing to work her fingers to the bone ; 
to live in want ; to deny to herself every worldly 
pleasure ; nay, to lay down her life itself. She died, 
as you know, without seeing the attainment of the 
object for which she had labored and prayed so 
ardently. 

Well, you are a man ; and yon are just as widely 
a favorite to-day as you were when you were a boy ; 
but you are not the man whom your mother prayed 
you might become, and are not likely to be. That you 
are stifling convictions of duty by the course which you 
are pursuing every man knows who remembers your 
early training and the nature upon which that training 
could not fail to leave its impress. You are a man whom 



To Edward Payfon Jones. 



everybody loves — whom everybody praises — whom 
everybody believes to be in a measure the subject of 
Christian conviction — whom everybody believes to be, 
within certain limits, controlled by Christian principle ; 
yet, in an irreligious community, you have never, in a 
manly way, declared yourself in the possession and on 
the side of personal Christianity. Under these circum- 
stances, there are some things which it seems to me to 
be my duty to say to you. Will you read them ? 

Christianity is everything, or it is nothing — it is 
divine, or it is nothing — it has a right to the entire 
control of your life, or it has no claims at all. Is it 
necessary that I should argue to you the transcendent 
worth, the divine origin, or the grand claims of that 
religion which made an angel of your mother, and 
transformed the little room in which she died into 
heaven's gateway ? Is it necessary for me to assure 
you that these convictions of duty which haunt 
you everywhere, which assert themselves in your 
heart in every scene of questionable mirth and care- 
less society, are not superstitions engendered by early 
education in error ? Is it necessary that I should try 
to prove to you that a life which does not acknowl- 
edge a rule of action imposed by the Author of life 
must necessarily be a life of transgression and the 
fruits of transgression ? Not at all. You do not ask 
me to do this. You know — you are entirely con- 



74 Letters to the Jonefes. 

vinced — that you owe the devoted allegiance of your 
heart, the obedience of your will, and the gift of your 
life to that religion in which alone abides the secret 
of the purification and salvation of yourself and your 
race. You are convinced that, without Christianity, 
this world would be as dark as the infernal shades — 
that it alone gives significance to life — that it alone 
can give such direction to its issues that they shall 
rise to everlasting harmony and everlasting happi- 
ness. 

There are those around you who do not believe in 
these things. They were not trained as you were 
trained. Their mother was not your mother, and they 
were not endowed with your nature. They do not 
possess your pureness of insight. In short, they are 
not, to any great extent, the subjects of religious con- 
viction ; and yet you choose these men for your 
associates and fellows. I ask you now whether you 
consider it a manly thing for one like you, with your 
convictions, to live like one who has no convictions — 
whether you do not feel that you are really disgracing 
yourself and depreciating your ovrn self-respect by 
constantly refusing to yield your heart and life to 
the claim of those convictions which never leave 
you. 

While you give such answers to these questions as 
I know yon cannot fail to give, and while you*half 



To Edward Payfon Jones. 



75 



resolve to yield to convictions wnich I know are press- 
ing upon you now with redoubled force, you look 
forward to the possible consequences of a change in 
the motives and regulating forces of your life. Before 
your imagination, glaring gloomily in the distance, 
there stands a lion in the way. A hearty and uncon- 
ditional surrender to your convictions would involve 
ohanges in your social relations, in habits which have 
become endeared to you, in the general sources from 
which you have drawn the satisfactions of your life. 
You know that a change like this would bring with 
it a public declaration of your faith, and a publicly 
formed union with those men and women who have 
organized themselves into the Christian church. You 
shrink from this with a sensitiveness of selfish pride 
which ought to show you that you are very much 
farther from being a Christian than you suppose your- 
self to be, for, with all your consciousness of religious 
convictions stifled, you are fondly cherishing the 
fancy that you are already quite as good as Christians 
average. 

Now you know, my friend, that I do not entertain 
a very extravagent opinion of the prerogatives of the 
Christian church. ~No church has the power to save 
you or me, or to say whether you or I shall be saved 
or not. You know also that I am no propagandist of 
sectarian doctrines and policies. If a church is a 



76 Letters to the Jonefes. 

Christian church, that is enough. I do not care the 
value of a straw by what name it calls itself. I look 
upon it as a school of Christian disciples — of imperfect 
men and women who have chosen Christianity as their 
religion — their reforming motive and their rule of 
life — the grand system of spiritual truths in which 
they have garnered their hopes for this life and the 
life to come — garnered their temporal and eternal satis- 
factions. I do not believe in the infallibility of any 
church, or in the sinlessness of any member of a church. 
Nay, I do not believe that the act of uniting with 
a church has in itself any saving grace whatever. 
Church is not Christianity, and Christianity is not 
church, in any practical sense. A man is probably 
just as good a Christian the moment before joining a 
church as he is the moment after ; but a Christian will 
cast in his lot with Christians, if he possesses a decent 
degree of manhood, and share with them in the Chris- 
tian work of the world. 

I know very well what the influences are which 
restrain you from yielding to your convictions, and 
from taking the public step which would naturally 
follow such a surrender. You love praise. You 
love to be loved by everybody, and you have very 
strong friends among all sorts of people. The good 
people praise you, and feel as if you, with your 
straightforward life and pure habits, belonged to 



To Edward Payfon Jones. 



71 



them. The bad people love you, and feel that, by 
your practical denial of the claims of Christianity, 
you make their position respectable. But where do 
you find your delights ? Who are your cronies ? 
Whose society do you seek ? When you feel inclined 
to yield to your convictions of duty, whose are the 
shrugging shoulders and the pitying smiles — whose 
are the quiet jest and the banter and badinage which 
come in quick vision to you, to shame and scare you ? 
My friend, you do not love that which is characteristic- 
ally Christian society. You love that which has no 
Christian element in it except the element of decency ; 
and you feel that to become the member of a Chris- 
tian church would throw you out of sympathy with 
men whose good will and good fellowship you count 
among your choicest treasures. You cannot bear that 
these men should think you weak and womanish. You 
cannot bear to become the subject of their lenient and 
charitable scorn. 

Human friendship is very sweet. These ties that 
bind heart to heart — these sympathetic responses of 
kindred natures — these loves among men glorify 
human life ; but they not unfrequently form a bond 
of union so strong that one powerful nature will, 
through their aid, carry whithersoever it will — even 
mto the jaws of destruction — all the lives that are 
joined with it. The ice upon the mountain side links 



78 Letters to the Jonefes. 

rock to rock till the lightning or the earthquake 
loosens the hold of the giant of the group, and it drags 
them all into the valley below. Life nearly always 
follows the current of its friendships or flows parallel 
with it. If a man finds his most grateful companion- 
ships among those who are irreligious — either nega- 
tively or positively — he shows just what and where 
his heart is. Like seeks and sympathizes with 
like. 

I ask you, Edward Payson Jones, to apply this test 
to yourself. What kind of society do you delight in 
most ? Do you love and cling to those most who best 
represent to you the religion in which your mother 
lived and died, or those who practically hold that 
religion in very light esteem ? I ask you to apply 
this test, because I think you are entertaining the idea 
that, although you make no professions, you are quite 
as good a Christian as those are who do. My friend, 
you choose freely to give your most intimate friend- 
ships to the worldlings by whom you are surrounded. 
I state the fact, and leave you to your own con- 
clusions. 

There is another powerful influence which dissuades 
you from yielding to your convictions. You are 
absorbed in business. All the activities of your nature 
are given to it. Great business responsibilities are 
upon you, and your heart gives them glad entertain- 



To Edward Payfon Jones. 79 

ment, for they are full of promise to your ambition 
and your desire for wealth. Business occupies nearly 
all your w^fcing thoughts, and even haunts your pil- 
low and breaks your slumbers. It obtrudes itself upon 
your family life, and monopolizes both your time and 
your vital power. Your heart is so full that you have 
no room in it for another object. Wife and children 
and friends and business— these four ; but the greatest 
of these, practically, is business. If you will candidly 
examine yourself, you will see that I do not overrate 
this power of business which shuts out from your heart 
a guest who sits and shivers in its anteroom in the cold 
society of your convictions. To make this matter still 
worse, you are thrown into contact with men in the 
way of business upon whom you are, to a certain extent, 
dependent for your prosperity, who hold Christianity 
and its professed friends and possessors in contempt. 
You cannot bear this contempt. These men, with their 
business thoughts and schemes, break in upon your Sab- 
baths, they tempt you, they familiarize your ears with 
profanity, and invest you constantly with an atmosphere 
of worldliness. You have in your present position no 
defence against the influence of these associations. You 
have never declared yourself upon the side of Christian- 
ity, and these business friends of yours know it. They 
recognize you as one of their own number, and treat 
you accordingly; and yet, you are foolish enough to 



80 



Letters to the Jonefes. 



believe, or to try to make yourself believe, that a man 
can be just as good a Christian outside of the church 
as inside of it ! Why, my friend, you are a man of 
honor. However much disgusted and abused, your 
nature is a chivalrous one. If you felt yourself iden- 
tified with a great cause, would you betray it ? Have 
you not often comforted yourself with the considera- 
tion that, if you have failed to become what your 
convictions have urged you to become, no one has 
been harmed but yourself ? 

I have spoken of you as a man of honor. I think 
you are sensitively such. I know of no man who more 
thoroughly despises a mean and unmanly spirit, or a 
mean and unmanly deed. If you were to see a man 
who, for any reason, should cast his vote at an election 
contrary to his convictions of political duty, or any 
man who should stand upon the fence in an important 
canvass and refuse to place himself on the side of the 
right, or who, in a great public emergency, should 
fail to perform his duty through absorbing devotion 
to his private pursuits, you would think him a mean 
man. You would despise particularly one whom you 
knew to be the subject of strong political convictions, 
which were so feebly pronounced that all parties claim- 
ed him. I take your own standard and apply it to 
you. I say, on the authority of your own best judg- 
ments, that it is mean and unmanly for you, with your 



To Edward Payfon Jones. 



81 



strong religious convictions, to refuse to stand by 
them, and act up to them. It is mean and unmanly 
for you to refuse to identify yourself with the society, 
and assist in maintaining and forwarding the cause 
of those whom, sooner or later, you deliberately 
intend to join, and whom you feel and know to be in 
the right. If you were not convinced of the truth, I 
should be , more charitable toward you. If there 
remained anything to be done in shaping the judgment 
of your intellect and your heart, you would have some 
excuse ; but no such exigency exists. No, sir : you 
are convinced ; but you flinch, and you refuse to stand 
in a manly way by what you know and feel to be 
right. 

While I thus blame you, I pity you. I know 
how much your heart bends before these words of 
mine, and how impotent you feel for action in the 
right direction. You almost feel as if your hands and 
feet were tied. You almost feel as if you must follow 
your old friendships — that they have fastened them- 
selves to you by hooks of steel which cannot be 
broken. You feel that your business is upon you, 
and all its associations, and that neither can be lifted. 
You feel that you really have no room in your life 
for those experiences and those duties which accom- 
pany the surrender of the heart to religion. You 
feel yourself walled around by obstacles, and, what 



82 Letters to the Jonefes. 

is really worse than this, you know that you grow 
more and more in love with the life you lead, and 
less inclined to take the direction of your early train- 
ing. The oath does not shock you as it once did; 
vulgarity is not as offensive as it once was ; you have 
learned to look more leniently upon the vices of the 
men by wjiom you are surrounded ; worldliness does 
not seem so barren a form of life as formerly ; you 
are charmed and excited by success ; and you cannot 
deny to yourself the fact that, strong as your convic- 
tions of duty are, your h'eart and your life are growing 
more and more widely estranged from them. Where 
do you suppose all thi* will end ? You have common 
sense, and can judge as well as I. Do habits grow 
weaker by long continuance ? Are the cares of busi- 
ness less absorbing as life advances ? Is moral con- 
viction the stronger for constant denial and insult ? I 
say, you have common sense, and can judge as well as 
I. You know as well as I that this life of yours must 
have a rupture with its surroundings — that your 'feet 
must turn into another path — that you must yield 
yourself a conquest to your convictions, or that your 
life will be one of disaster, and that its end will be 
wretchedness or an induration worse than wretched- 
ness. 

You are surrounded by a crowd of men and women 
who do not regard life as a very serious thing. They 



To Edward Payfon Jones. 



83 



take it carelessly and gayly. Yon see the multitudes 
rnshing along in the pursuit of baubles. ^Men live and 
die, and there conies back no voice to tell whether the} 
sleep with the brutes or wake with the angels. Men 
eat and sleep, and love and hate, and make display of 
their equipage, and pursue their ambitions and indulge 
in all the forms of vanity and pride, and all life comes 
at last to seem like a sort of phantasmagoria — empty, 
unreal, insignificant.* You see that these convictions 
of yours have no place in the multitude of minds 
around you, and no place in the current of life by 
which you feel yourself borne along. There are 
moments, I suppose, when you doubt the soundness 
of these convictions — when you half believe that you 
are the victim of a morbid conscience, or of a super- 
stitious impression. At such moments as these — when 
the tricks of the world delude you most, come back 
to your mother, and learn the truth. That life of 
hers, so pure and unselfish and useful, and that death 
of hers, so peaceful and triumphant, are realities. 
They can never lie to you, and the moment you touch 
them, you know that you touch something divine — 
something by the side of which all worldliness and 
wealth and material success are chaff. 

You will perceive, in what I have written to you, 
that I have not undertaken to convince you of any- 
thing. I have not undertaken even to deepen your 



84 Letters to the Jonefes. 

convictions. I have simply endeavored to reveal yon 
and your own experience to yourself, and to urge you 
to yield to convictions which I know are striving to 
gain the control of your life. I have simply urged 
you to be true to yourself — to take a bold, manly, 
consistent stand upon the side which you know to be 
right — to be a Christian man in Christian society, 
and to refuse longer to stand upon what you mistaken- 
ly regard as neutral ground. Do you know that you 
are abusing and ruining yourself? Do you realize 
that the passage of every day renders it less probable 
that your convictions will ever gain the victory over 
yon? 

I appreciate the struggle it would cost you to 
welcome the new motive and change the policy and 
issues of your life. The preacher may talk as he will 
of the ease of the path of life and the ease of yielding 
up the will, but you and I know that there is no ease 
about it. We know that whatever may be the truth 
touching the doctrine of universal total depravity, it 
is not natural for us to lead religious lives. It takes 
sacrifice and fighting and heroism to do that. I know 
it, and you know it. Easy to be a Christian man? 
It is mean for a man like you not to be one— it is 
wrong for a man like you not to be one — but Heaven 
knows it is not easy for you to be one, or you would 
have been one long ago. No, my friend ; it will be 



To Edward Payfon Jones. 85 

hard for you to be one, and it will grow harder every 
year till you become one. But it pays, and when you 
are once fairly on the right side, you will not care for 
the struggle, for you will have good company, a clean 
conscience, and an outlook into the far future unclouded 
and full of inspiration. 



THE SIXTH LETTER. 



Co Prs, loss §tll gom 



CONCERNING TEE DIFFICULTY SHE EXPERIENCES IN 
KEEPING HER SERVANTS. 

IT has been stated to me, confidentially, that you 
have had nineteen different cooks and thirteen 
chambermaids in your house during the past year 
This may be slightly above the annual average. I 
should hope so. I do not understand how flesh and 
blood could endure such changes. Yet you live and 
thrive ; and the new servants come and go at about 
the usual number per month. Your husband grew 
tired, long ago, with rasping against so much new 
domestic material, but has learned fortitude by 
practice. One or two attempts on his part to tell 
you that there were women who kept their servants 
for months and years without change, and to convince 
you that it was possible that there were bad mistresses 



To Mrs. Jeffy Bell Jones. 87 

in the world as well as bad servants, resulted in scenes 
which will be avoided in future. Not if he were to see 
a procession of young women entering your house and 
emerging from it through all the weary year— not if 
he were to hear a constant storm raging in the kitchen 
and echoing throughout the passages and chambers, 
would he ever intimate that you were not the paragon 
of mistresses, and that your girls were not the mean- 
est, dirtiest, sauciest pot-sl ewers that ever invaded an 
abode of civilization. 

7$fr, Mrs. Jones ; you will have it all your own way, 
without any interference from him. He knows you are 
in the wrong, and so do you ; but he will never tell 
you so again. On the contrary, he will sympathize 
with you after a fashion, and take your part in all your 
quarrels and all your domestic difficulties ; but he will 
quietly wish, meanwhile, that you had the faculty of 
getting along pleasantly with your servants. I have 
intimated to you that you know yourself to be in the 
wrong. You are not a fool. On the contrary, you 
are a very sharp, bright woman, and you cannot fail 
to see that there is a reason, somewhere in your house, 
for your failure to keep your servants. Your neigh- 
bor lives in the same climate that you do. The roof 
of her house is covered by slate from the same quar- 
ry ; her Stuart's stove is of the same size as yours ; 
her laundry is no more convenient than yours ; her 



88 Letters to the Jonefes. 

servants are no better fed than yours ; she gives no 
better wages than you; but she keeps her servants, 
and you do not keep yours. When one of her servants 
marries, or sickens, or, for any reason, wishes to leave 
her, fifty others stand ready to take her place, and she 
has her pick of them. all, while you are obliged to 
take such as come, and such as feel compelled to come 
after having heard that you are a hard mistress. For 
you must know that masters and mistresses have 
reputations among servants — reputations made up, 
and weighed, and widely known. You, and a. hun- 
dred other women whom I know, have bad reputa- 
tions among servants ; and when you deal with them 
you are always obliged to deal with them under the 
disadvantage which a bad reputation bears with it. 

Suppose we have a little plain talk about these 
matters, and see if we can get at an understanding 
of them. You will pardon me if I tell you, in the 
first place, that you are an opinionated person, which 
is a mild way of stating that, in certain respects, you 
are very conceited. Your pet conceit is that you are a 
model housekeeper, and your opinion is that you know 
the best and only proper modes of doing the work in 
your kitchen, and in your house generally. You have 
your own way of doing everything. You have your 
particular order, in which all things about you are to 
be done. The machinery of your household arrange- 



To Mrs. Jeffy Bell Jones. 89 

ments, as it exists in your mind, is a perfect whole, and 
every executive element that you introduce into it 
must adapt itself to that machinery, or it is cast out 
at once, or is so harassed that it casts itself out. Sup- 
pose a girl enters your kitchen who understands her 
business, but who has learned it under another mistress, 
and a different household economy. She has learned to 
do her work in a certain way, and after a certan order. 
She has her notions as well as you. It is quite possible 
that those notions may be in many respects better than 
yours. You insist, however, from the moment she 
enters your service, that she shall do your work in your 
way. You do not wait to see results. You do not 
wait to see how she will succeed if left entirely to her- 
self, but you go into the kitchen with her, and superin- 
tend every act. You give her no freedom, you encour- 
age no independent effort ; you take the whole burden 
on yourself, and insist that she shall be your machine. 
When she forgets your directions, or steps aside from 
them, you find fault with her. She soon tires with this 
sort of treatment, and you are told to look for another 
girl. 

I have told you that your pet conceit is that you 
are a model housekeeper, and tried to show that your 
difficulties with your servants grow out of your insist- 
ing that they shall do everything in your way. I 
think I may justly say, in addition, that there is a 



90 Letters to the Jonefes. 

certain sensitiveness of will in yonr constitution 
which aggravates these difficulties. You are impe- 
rious. There is one spot in the world where you have 
the right to rule — one spot where that will of yours 
has the right to assert itself and make itself law. 
Perhaps there is no other spot where your will is 
recognized. Your house is your 'only domain. There 
you are a queen, and you are sensitively alive to 
all interference with your prerogatives. It frets 
you to feel that there is any other person in the 
house, with a will, who has anything to do or say 
ah out your domestic affairs. You do not feel that 
a servant has a right to an independent opinion on 
any subject connected with her service ; and when 
any such opinion finds practical expression, it enrages 
you. A servant may feel that if she does her work 
well, in the way most convenient to her, she does 
all that you can reasonably claim ; but you feel that 
unless that work — in all its modes and particulars — ■ 
has followed the channel of your will, you have been 
insulted in your own house. In short, madam, you 
are " touchy," and when you are touched, you scold, 
and when you scold, off goes your girl. You have 
excellent pluck, however. I have never known you to 
lament the loss of a servant. They were always such 
terrible creatures that you were glad to get rid of them. 
I do not know how you came to be just the sort of 



To Mrs. Jeffy Bell Jones. 91 

mistress you are. You were a very pleasant little 
girl, with a sweet temper. It has really puzzled me 
to find out the reason for your peculiar development. 
I suppose there must he an " ugly streak " in you 
somewhere, hut you did not show it when you were 
a child. Your hair is red, I know (call it golden), 
and your eyes "black,- but the hair is beautiful and soft, 
and the eye has a world of love in it for the man it 
worships and for his children. My theory is that 
every nature which has any force in it will assert 
itself somewhere, in some form, and that if it fails 
to be recognized in society, it will make itself recog- 
nized where there are none to dispute its claims. I 
do not recall a single famous housekeeper, with a 
splendid faculty for getting rid of servants, and a 
bad reputation among them, who, at the same time, 
was a woman widely recognized in society. If you, 
Mrs. Jessy Bell Jones, were an acknowledged power 
and authority in the social circle ; if you were a fine 
musician with the opportunity to charm your friends ; 
if you had a high degree- of literary culture and were 
received everywhere in literary circles as an ornament 
or an equal; if you possesed a recognized value out 
of your house, or in your parlor, beyond other women 
of your class or set, I think you would be content — 
that your servants would get along well enough, and 
that you would get along well enough with them. 



92 Letters to the Jonefes. 

But you have turned housekeeper, and directed all 
your energies and all your ambitions, and all your 
will, into the channel of housekeeping ; and woe to 
the servant who stands in your way. 

Under these circumstances, there are a few prac- 
tical questions which it would be well for you to ask 
yourself. Do you feel that your system of manage- 
ment pays? Do you enjoy these constant troubles 
with your servants ? Do you think your husband 
enjoys them, and your irate or plaintive representa- 
tions of them ? Do you not feel sometimes as if you 
would be willing to give a good deal of money, and 
put yourself to a good deal of trouble to get along as 
smoothly with your girls as some of your neighbors 
do ? Do you wish or expect always to live the same 
sort of life you are living now ? 

In making up your answers to these questions, you 
must remember that any change which may be made 
must begin with yourself. If you are really willing to 
make sacrifices for the sake of peace and perpetuity 
in your domestic arrangements, you can have both ; 
but you will be obliged to sacrifice your will, and a 
good many of your pet notions concerning house- 
keeping. If it is sweeter to you to have your will, 
than it is to keep girls steadily who will serve you 
reasonably well, why, of course, that settles the 
question ; though it is doubtful whether you would 



To Mrs. Jeffy Bell Jones. 93 

get so niuch of your will accomplished by sending 
them away as you would by keeping them. 

You must take certain facts into consideration 
when you hire a servant. The most important is, 
perhaps, that when you hire a servant you do not 
buy a slave. You do not buy the right to badger 
and scold her, to impose upon her unreasonable bur- 
dens, or to treat her as if she were only an animal. 
You are to remember, also, that there are two sides 
to this relation of mistress and servant. Labor is not 
a drug in this country yet, thank Heaven, and it is 
quite as important to you that you have servants, as 
it is to your girls that they do service. You and your 
girls are under mutual obligations to treat each other 
well. In England and on the Continent, where human 
life, owing to peculiar circumstances, is in excess — a 
condition which cannot possibly exist in healthily 
constituted society — servants are born into families 
often, and grow up dependants, forever attached 
to the family name and interest. A good place and 
a permanent one is equivalent to a treasure with them, 
and they will make many sacrifices to preserve it, 
Here, it is different. Labor is everywhere in demand, 
and no girl ever steps out of your door without know- 
ing that, within a short space of time, she can easily 
find another place, with a chance at least for better 
treatment than you give her. 



94 Letters to the Jonefes. 

There is another consideration to which I am sure 
sufficient importance has not been attached. You 
are a Protestant, as the majority of Americans are, 
and you know that servants who come to you, and 
whom the most of us employ, are Catholics. It is 
notorious and incontrovertible that your servants 
are taught to consider you a heretic — a person who 
has no religion, and who is bound as directly for 
hell as if she were a murderess. It is cruel to teach 
these ignorant women such horrible stuff, but they 
are taught it. The Irish girl in your kitchen, who 
perhaps does not know her alphabet — who probably 
has not the first idea of the vital truths of Chris- 
tianity — regards you and the whole community of 
American Protestants with contempt, as the accursed 
of God, and of those whom she supposes to be His 
representatives on the earth. She has been bred to 
this opinion, and it may be the only really strong 
opinion she has in her mind. She has no doubt that 
a drunken, profane, lying scoundrel, if he is only 
in the Catholic church, has a better chance for heaven 
than the purest Protestant that lives, because she has 
been taught from childhood that there is no salvation 
out of " the church." Now I say that women thus 
bred cannot possibly entertain such a degree of respect 
for you that they will take patiently your style of 
treatment. It is notorious that they receive, eveu 



To Mrs. Jeffy Bell Jones. 95 

with abject humility, indignities from masters and 
mistresses belonging to their church, while they exact 
from Protestants the last ounce of that which is their 
due as Christian women. I do not complain of this par- 
ticularly, but I allude to it to show that you, and every 
Protestant mistress in America, must necessarily labor 
under disadvantages in the management of servants. 

There is still another consideration which you and 
all other mistresses should make, which is, that all 
girls who are good for anything must do their work in 
their own way, or not do it well. One of the hardest 
things in this world for any person who has brains, and 
the power to use them, is to do another person's work 
is another person's way. To most persons, the attempt 
to do this is always disgusting, and often distressing. 
It is only hacks and blockheads that can possibly sub- 
mit themselves to the degradation which such a service 
involves. You must always be content with these, or 
you must have servants who have some notions and 
ways of their own. A servant may be a very humble 
person, but she has her will, and her pride, and her 
desire to be somebody in her place, just as much as 
you have ; and she will not sell her right to entertain 
an opinion and have her way in the little details of 
her service for a dollar and seventy-five cents a week, 
to you or anybody else. I must confess that I sym- 
pathize with her in this thing. Among your servants 



96 Letters to the Jonefes. 

you may reasonably require results economically at- 
tained, but all that exactness which insists on dustr 
ing a piano from the north to the south, or prescribes 
the whole routine of a kitchen, to its minutest particu- 
lar, and vigilantly maintains it, is an insult and a hard- 
ship, and is certain to be regarded and treated as such 
by every servant who is good for anything. 

Now if you are willing to make all these con- 
siderations, you can have servants and keep them. 
If you are willing to consider that your servant is 
not a slave, and has a right to the treatment due to 
a rational woman, that you have no right to harass 
her with your notions or your petulancies, that you 
are under as strong an obligation to treat her well as 
she is to treat you well, that she has been bred to 
consider you a heretic — one for whom God has no 
respect and Heaven no home, that it is in the nature 
of things impossible for a really capable and good 
servant to do her work cheerfully and well when she 
is required to do it in a way not her own, that in this 
world of imperfection there are some things which 
will be unpleasant " in the best regulated families," 
that it is better to enjoy peace generally, than to 
have one's will in unimportant particulars, — I say 
that if you are willing to consider all these things, I 
do not see why you may not keep your servants as 
long as other people, and have just as good a time 



To Mrs. Jeffy Bell Jones. 97 

with them. It will be very hard for you to break 
into this thing, and I know of but one way for you to 
proceed. Get a new cook— the best you can find — and 
promise to pay her good wages. Then hold up your 
right hand and swear in the presence of your husband 
(who will record your oath with unaffected delight), 
that you will not enter your kitchen for a month, unless 
it be to praise some particular dish, or tell the cook 
how nicely everything looks in her domain. At the 
end of the month, you will have learned that cooking 
can be carried on in your family without your help, that 
your cook is contented and pleased, that you are 
happier than you have been for ten years, that you 
have more time for reading and dressing and visiting, 
and that the inconveniences attending a course like 
this are much less than those which have thus far 
accompanied your housekeeping life. I would not 
prescribe constant absence from the kitchen as the 
only safe course for all ; I simply say that it is the 
only safe course for you. After a few months shall have 
passed away, and you shall have come to love your new 
way of life, it will be safe for you to take a general 
oversight of your kitchen again. You must run, how- 
ever, whenever you feel the old fever coming on. 

Did you ever think how easy it would be to make 
your pretty name — " Jessy Bell " — into Jezebel ? It 
would be just as easy to transform your pretty nature 
5 



98 Letters to the Jonefes. 

into one which that name alone would fitly represent. 
I do not account you one of those women, possessed 
with the devil, who are as much the horror of husband 
and children as of servants. You are not even one 
of those women (from whom the gods defend me 
and mine !) to whom the vision of a speck of dirt is 
the cause of a convulsion and the inspiration of a 
lecture that would frighten anything but a clod out 
of the house. Mysterious are the ways of women. 
There be women who take delight in being miserable 
and making others so ; who can scold, or cry, or howl, 
or spit fire ; who would not be happy if they could 
be ; who badger everybody — implacable, unreasonable, 
abominable women, from whom all gentle womanhood 
has departed. There be such women as these, I say, 
and you have seen them. Will you permit me to tell 
you that you are in great danger of becoming one of 
them? It is not hard for a woman in your circum- 
stances, who has set up for model housekeeper, with 
a sensitive will and a determination to have every- 
thing in her own way, to neglect the cultivation of 
those goodnesses and graces which keep her spirit 
soft, and keep it in sympathy with those who love her. 
The secret of living comfortably in this world, 
consists in making the best of such unpleasant things 
as cannot be avoided. It is necessary for you to have 
servants, and it is necessary for you to obtain your 



To Mrs. Jeffy Bell Jones. 99 

servants from the same class that the rest of us do. 
They are not a very reliable class of people, but they 
have in them the labor that you want, and must have. 
The question simply is, whether, under the circum- 
stances, you will make yourself and your husband 
miserable by insisting on that which you have never 
yet succeeded in getting — perfect servants — the perfect 
slaves of your will — or whether you will get the best 
servants you can, make allowance for their short- 
comings, and put up with their imperfect service for 
the sake of peace. The way in which you answer this 
question will determine everything concerning the 
comfort of your home life, and much concerning your 
own personal character. The best way for you is to 
confess — to yourself, at least — that you have been all 
in the wrong, and to change your entire policy. Turn 
your energies in some other direction. Be as good a 
housekeeper as you can, under the circumstances, and 
be content with such modest attainments as servants 
moderately intelligent and immoderately independent 
will permit. Thus will Mrs. Jessy Bell Jones live long 
and comfortably on the earth, rejoicing the hearts of 
her husband and children, enjoying a good reputation 
among the class on which she must depend for service, 
taking comfort in ladylike pursuits, and avoiding the 
imminent danger in which she stands of becoming 
" Mrs. Jezebel Jones." 



THE SEVENTH LETTER. 

%q Halaijjicl ^ogg forces, %mitraM. 

CONCERNING THE FAITH AND PROSPECTS OF HIS SECT OF 
RELIGIONISTS. 

YOU happen to be one of the men ordained from 
the foundation of the world to be a Spiritualist. 
There are many unlike you who are Spiritualists, but 
there are none like you who are not. You have all 
that natural love of what is novel and marvellous, and 
that peculiar mixture of credulity and skepticism, and 
that perverse disposition to run against the feelings 
and prejudices of people, which would lead you to 
embrace Spiritualism. Wherever I find a man who 
possesses your peculiar nature and character, I always 
find a Spiritualist; for if Spiritualism does not come 
to him, he goes to it. You were a Fourierite when I 
first knew you, and you rode the hobby of Fourierism 
until you rode it to death. Every "ism" that has 



To Salathiel Fogg Jones. 



101 



been started during the last twenty years has numbered 
you among its champions. You were a zealous aboli- 
tionist until abolitionism became popular, and then, with- 
out turning against it, you seemed to lose your interest 
in it. When Spiritualism made its appearance, I knew 
that you would be a Spiritualist, as well as I knew that 
" fire, ascending, seeks the sun." It was the natural 
thing for you. 

I was not at all surprised, therefore, when you 
caught me by the button-hole one day, at the corner 
of a street, and announced to me the conviction that 
you could demonstrate the immortality of the human 
soul. You may, perhaps, remember the smile which 
your announcement excited. I confess that it amused 
me. You seemed as interested and pleased about the 
matter as if you had never heard of such a thing as 
immortality before. A book had been in your hands 
ever since you could read, that told you all about it. 
A belief in this immortality had incorporated itself 
into the constitution and governments of all the power- 
ful nations of the world ; had moulded civilization — 
nay, had created civilization out of barbarism ; had 
introduced into society its highest motives and its 
most purifying elements ; had sustained the courage 
and inspired the hope of multitudes of dying saints 
and martyrs through all ages ; had surrounded you all 
your life with the evidences of its vitality, and yet, 



102 Letters to the Jonefes. 

you had but just satisfied yourself on the question, by 
means of unaccountable raps on a table, in the dark, 
which, through a little assistance of your own, had 
spelled out, in bad orthography and worse syntax, an 
insignificant sentence ! Here was a moral force that 
had moved the world, yet it had not moved you ! 
You — wiser, more acute, less credulous, less supersti- 
tious — had waited to see a table dance before you 
could believe in that realm of spiritual things which 
has hung above and embraced you since you were 
born, and which has always had a representative in 
your own bosom ! 

This has been one of the marvels of these latter- 
day developments in Spiritualism : that men who have 
been skeptical on all cognate subjects, and have resist- 
ed all the moral and spiritual evidences of immortality 
— resisted all the evidences germane to the subject — 
have bowed like bulrushes before the proofs that come 
to them from a mysteriously played banjo, or a com- 
mon place message, pretended to be rapped out by a 
friend on the other side of the river. It took Mate- 
rialism to prove Spiritualism to these very acute men ; 
and they thought that, because they had seen matter 
moved by spirit, or what they supposed to be spirit, 
they had made a prodigious advance. They have been 
floored by proofs that do not add a hair's weight to 
the faith of any genuine Christian in the world. They 



To Salathiel Fogg Jones, 103 

think that they have made a discovery, and that Chris- 
tians are afraid of it, when the truth is that they have 
made no discovery whatever, and that Christians are 
above it. The proofs of spirituality and of immortality, 
to be found in what is called Spiritualism, are the 
grossest that can possibly be produced, supposing them 
to be genuine. They are proofs that deal with matter 
exclusively, and appeal to the commonest and lowest 
order of minds. It is you, my friend, who are behind 
the age, and not the Christians at whose faith you 
scoff, simply because you are not up to it and cannot 
appreciate it. You receive a. little thing because you 
are not sufficient to receive a large one. 

I do not intend, in the few paragraphs which I 
propose to write to you, to undertake the overthrow 
of your proofs of Spiritualism. I am willing, indeed, 
to confess that I have witnessed, among much that was 
undoubtedly the result of deception and jugglery, 
phenomena which I could not rationally account for 
by any other theory than that which assigns to them 
a spiritual origin. But those phenomena have never 
contributed anything to my conviction that I am 
immortal, and that there is a realm of spiritual exist- 
ence which holds the product of unnumbered worlds 
and the history of an eternity. They have never 
made so much as a ripple on the surface of my faith. 
Their apparent aim has been so limited, many of them 



104 Letters to the Jonefes.. 

have been so low and frivolous, some of them have been 
so vicious, and all have had so much more to do with 
matter than with spirit, or with spiritual truth, that they 
have never seemed worthy for an instant to have any 
consideration as parts of any religious system, or as 
opponents of any religious system. It is an insult to 
common sense, no less than an offence to decency, to 
compare the conglomerate trash which has been issued 
as the teachings of the spirits with Christianity, as a 
system of religion ; and it is a simple impossibility for 
a true and hearty Christian to accept in the place of 
his faith the peepings and the mutterings of a pack of 
lying demons, whose deceptions and tricks are acknowl- 
edged by their best friends. 

The rule which the Author of Christianity an- 
nounced, an$ which the common judgment of the 
world has indorsed — that a tree is known by its fruits — 
is one which it is now proper to apply to Spiritualism. 
Fifteen years have passed since the new sect made its 
first batch of proselytes. It is time to be looking for 
the fruit of this tree, which, at the beginning, was 
declared to be so full of golden promise. I ask you 
if you have found Spiritualism particularly nourishing 
to yourself. Are you a better man than you were 
ten years ago ? How much progress have you made 
toward real spirituality ? How much more devout is 
vour worship of the Great God than it was before 



To Salathiel Fogg Jones. 105 

you were convinced of the immortality of your own 
soul ? How much have your affections been purified, 
your love of spiritual things strengthened, your lust 
for sensual indulgence diminished, by this new faith 
of yours ? Has your sense of moral obligation grown 
stronger ? Has your benevolence increased ? Has 
your love of all that is good and pure grown brighter, 
while the sensual delights of your animal life have 
faded? These are important questions to you, and 
they are very important questions to Spiritualism 
itself. 

I must be plain with you, and tell you that if 
Spiritualism has improved you I have failed to see it. 
I do not see that you have even made any progress 
intellectually. You pretend that Spiritualism reveals 
great truths in which abide the seeds of progress and 
perfection for a race, but. these seeds do not germi- 
nate in you. On the contrary, you seem content to 
stand at the threshold of your new religion, and to 
amuse yourself with the same insignificant phenomena 
which first attracted your attention. I hear of your 
holding weekly, or semi-weekly, sessions or "circles" 
where there are the ringing of bells, and playing of 
guitars, and the scraping of fiddles, and the tipping of 
tables, and the rubbing of faces, and the rapping of 
knuckles. It is the same old story of a sort of frolic 
or orgy with demons, and no step forward into a 

5* 



106 Letters to the Jonefes. 

divine life. As it is with you, so is it with all that I 
have seen. I will not speak of the immoralities to 
which Spiritualism has given origin or opportunity. 
Free love is not a plant indigenous to Spiritualism. 
It starts in human nature, and grows wherever there 
is license. The doctrine of " affinities " is as old as 
the race, and has found its advocates among the beastly 
of all races and the bad of all religions. I say I will 
not speak of the immoralities which have been asso- 
ciated with Spiritualism, because they are not peculiar 
to it ; but I say that I cannot perceive that you make 
the slightest progress intellectually — you or your friends. 
You have always been busy with these little material 
phenomena, which have no more spiritual significance 
or . vitality in them than there is in the grunts that 
come from a pig-sty — not half as much as there is in a 
concert by Christy's minstrels. Has Spiritualism 
nothing more in it for you than this ? Is this the 
highest food it has to offer you ? Why, you ought 
to be intellectually a giant by this time. With immor- 
tality demonstrated to you, in daily communion with 
the spiritual world, with vision clarified of all errors 
and superstitions, you ought to have made advances 
which would prove to an incredulous world that Spirit- 
ualism has in it the seeds at least, of the intellectual 
millennium. It is not necessary for me to tell you 
that you have done no such thing. You have been 



To Salathiel Fogg Jones. 107 

mixed up with two or three fanciful schemes for 
social improvement, that have not had enough of 
vitality in them to preserve them from quick degenera- 
tion, and these schemes have absorbed all your 
spiritual activities. Indeed, I think these " circles J 
have been rather dissipating than edifying to you. 

Literature has always been the record and the gauge 
of every form of civilization, every system of philoso- 
phy, and every scheme of religion ; and nothing is more 
certain than that any religion which possesses vitality 
will permeate and inform all the literature associated 
with it, and create for itself a literature which is espe- 
cially the product of its life. Thus, with the Bible for 
its basis, Christianity has created a literature of its 
own. An Alexandrian library could not contain the 
books which cluster around the Bible, deriving from it 
their sole inspiration and significance, and receiving 
from it all their power, while there is not a book of 
any kind written within the pale of Christian civiliza- 
tion which is not modified by it. And literature is but 
one of the forms of art in which the Christian religion 
betrays the vitality of its central truths and ideas. 
There is hardly a department of painting and sculpture 
and architecture that does not have reference, at some 
point, to it, while many departments are its direct out- 
growth and offspring. It is time that Spiritualism, if 
it possesses such claims and powers as are ascribed to 



108 Letters to the Jonefes. 

it, should make its mark on literature and art. Has i* 
done so ? 

I think that you cannot fail to regard the literature 
that has been the direct and immediate outgrowth of 
Spiritualism as, on the whole, of an exceedingly frivo- 
lous, weak, and unworthy character. Spiritualism has 
undertaken to deal with almost all forms of literary 
art. It has put forth orations, philosophical disquisi- 
tions, revelations concerning the unseen world, proph- 
ecies of future events, and poetry. These produc- 
tions purport to come from the spirits of departed men 
and women, who assume to speak from actual knowl- 
edge acquired in the realm of spiritual things. The 
least that can be assumed by the Spiritualist is that 
these utterances are the product of minds purified and 
exalted by freedom from the grosser animal life into 
which they were originally bom, strengthened and in- 
vigorated by direct contact with spiritual truth, and 
inspired by the vision of those realities of which we 
can only form, through guess and conjecture, the faint- 
est idea. I say that this is the least that can be as- 
sumed by the Spiritualist. It is the least that is as- 
sumed by you, or any one of your associates, concern- 
ing the utterances of your best spiritual correspond- 
ents ; yet I defy you to point me to a single oration 
originating in your circles that can compare with those 
of Webster, or Burke, or Everett ; a single philosophi- 



To Salathiel Fogg Jones. 109 

cal discourse that betrays the brains of a Bacon; a 
single revelation of the unseen world that can compare 
with that of John ; or a single poem that is not sur- 
passed many times by many poems from the pen of the 
lamented Mrs. Browning. You are lame in every field 
in which, in accordance with your theories, you should 
walk with kingly strides. You cannot hold in con- 
tempt the literary judgments of the world ; and the 
literary judgments of the world are against you. It is 
the decided opinion of those whose opinion you are 
bound to respect, that your theories of intellectual and 
spiritual progress beyond the grave are shockingly dis- 
proved by the products of the minds which pretend to 
address us from it. There is nothing in the literature 
of Spiritualism which, in power and beauty, and prac- 
tical adaptation to the wants of men, and skilful use 
of language, can compare with the literature written 
before Spiritualism made its first rap. Do you doubt 
it ? Look at the alcoves of the scholars and poets of 
the world, and mark the shelves which your classics 
occupy. They are not there at all, and their absence 
is owing to the simple fact that they are not worthy to 
be there. Literature is catholic. Literary men are not 
particular as to the source from which great thoughts 
come, and they will gather where they find them. 
They have not found them in the literature of Spiritu- 
alism. I state this as a fact, which you cannot deny ; 



110 Letters to the Jonefes. 

and I appeal to the literary men of the world as my 
witnesses. 

In the degree by which Spiritualism has failed to 
produce a worthy literature of its own, has it failed to 
incorporate itself as a vital force into any literature. 
In a few English novels we have seen evidences of its 
presence, but even there it has furnished only machine- 
ry for mysteries and not ideas for life. ISTo poet of 
power has gone to it for his inspirations. While miny 
literati have been attracted to its marvels, and not a 
small number of them have acknowledged their faith 
in the genuineness of its " manifestations," it finds no 
record in the characteristic products of their pens. 
And now, in view of all these facts, I declare my full 
conviction that Spiritualism, notwithstanding all its 
high pretensions and its ambitious efforts, has imported 
no new intellectual food into the world,. and brought 
no increment to its intellectual life. Has heaven been 
opened, my friend, to scatter crumbs and broken vict- 
uals to children already fed with bread from the tree 
of a nobler life ? Have the dead come back to prove 
to you and me that they have only made progress 
toward, or into, imbecility and idiocy ? Have the 
angels of God forgotten to be wise, and the saints of 
God learned to be silly ? Is a religion, or a system of 
philosophy, or a revelation of whatever character, good 
for anything, or worthy of a moment's consideration, 



To Salathiel Fogg Jones. m 

which gives us nothing greater and more abounding in 
vitality than what we have had before — nothing great 
and vital enough to create a literature of its own, which 
will command the respect of the world, and find its 
way through various channels of life into all literature ? 
You have common sense — or used to have. Answer 
the question. 

I remember very well the boast that you and your 
friends made, a few years ago, that the world was 
about to witness a new dispensation, through the min- 
istry and the revelations of Spiritualism. We had out- 
grown Christianity, as the world once outgrew Juda- 
ism, you declared, and so, burning up our soiled and 
worn-out creeds, and casting off the clothing of the 
Christian church, which had grown too strait for us, 
we were to emerge into a brighter light and a freer 
and a nobler life. Well, have your boasts proved to 
be well grounded ? You must not complain that I ask 
you this question, and say that I do not give you time 
enough, and refer me to the difficulty of the early steps 
of Christianity. Spiritualism was born into a very 
different age from that which witnessed the advent of 
Christianity. There was no steamboat, no railroad, no 
telegraph, no universal newspaper, no printing press, 
to wait upon the early steps of Christianity. The first 
wail in the little village of Bethlehem that gave notice 
of the advent of The Redeemer did not reach outside 



112 Letters to the Jonefes. 

of the walls of the stable where he lay ; but through 
the ministry of modern art — itself the child of Bethle- 
hem's child — the first rap at Rochester was heard 
throughout the nation. Every appliance of Christian 
civilization has waited upon the early steps of Spirit- 
ualism, and within fifteen years it has been sown 
wherever steam and lightning can travel, and men can 
read the language which they speak. It has been free 
to do what it would. It has published what it would. 
Prisons and scaffolds have not threatened those who 
received and entertained and advocated it. It has 
been patronized by the fashionable and the titled. 
Royalty itself has lent its eyes and ears to its marvels, 
and petted the mediums through which they were 
wrought. It has been brought fairly before the world, 
and now, what have you to say of the results ? 

Preliminarily, is it making progress to-day ? Does 
it occupy as large a place in the public mind of this 
country and of other countries as it did some years 
ago ? Is it winning as many proselytes as it was 
winning ten years ago ? Has it not already called to 
itself its own, and ceased to be aggressive ? Is it not 
already dyhig from lack of power to nourish and bless 
those who have been attracted to it ? It is probable 
that you would not answer these questions as I should, 
yet it seems to me as if there could be but one answer 
to them. I know that, as far as my acquaintance 



To Salathiel Fogg Jones. 113 

reaches, Spiritualism is making neither proselytes nor 
progress, and that many of those who were once its 
most earnest defenders have grown cold toward it, or 
careless of it. It has shown no power to fertilize so- 
ciety, and no disposition to organize society for philan- 
thropic effort. It has originated a few Utopian schemes 
that promised great things for human harmony and 
happiness, but they have fallen to pieces, light and 
flimsy as they were, of their own dead weight. I can- 
not point to anything that Spiritualism is really doing 
to elevate, purify, and save mankind. I cannot find in 
it that principle of love which uproots selfishness, or 
leads the martyr to dare his death of fire. 

Now, where is this effete Christianity whioh was to 
be displaced by Spiritualism? There never was a 
period of fifteen years in its history when it made 
more progress than it has made since Spiritualism was 
announced. The greatest revival the world ever saw 
has occurred during that period. It has planted its 
feet in new fields, and is everywhere aggressive. This 
Spiritualism, which was to supersede it, has hardly 
been a fly in the path of its gigantic progress. It is 
pushing its silent, individual conquests, and organizing 
its forces in the wilds of- the West, on the shores of 
the Pacific, in Australia, and among the heathen nations 
of the world. It is gaining new victories near the cen- 
tres of its power. It gives no sign of decay. It is 



114 Letters to the Jonefes. 

more and more widely recognized as the grand, saving 
and reforming power of the world — as a religion to 
live by and die by. It finds its way into governmental 
institutions. It more and more pervades every Hnd 
of literature, and you know that there is not a good 
thing in Spiritualism that Christianity had not previ- 
ously promulgated. 

There are some of your friends who will deny that 
Spiritualism opposes Christianity. Indeed, there are 
some who claim that they are really the only enlight- 
ened Christians in the world, Spiritualism having inter- 
preted Christianity to them. You are too honest to 
tell me this, I know, because you have talked very 
differently to me many times. You know that if Spir- 
itualism is not in opposition to Christianity, as a system 
of religion and of salvation, there is nothing in it what-.. 
ever. You know, and so do your friends, that Spirit- 
ualism is at least in opposition to that form of Chris- 
tianity which prevails in the world, and which marks 
its progress by such marvellous evidences of its vitality 
and power. 

My friend, you are eating husks, when you might 
have corn. Cut the delusion loose, for it is a dying 
thing. There is nothing more in it for you or the 
world — no more food, nor inspiration, nor light, nor 
life, nor blessing. All the good fellows are going my 
way. Come and join them. 



THE EIGHTH LETTER. 

$a §wJHmht JrBnfclm fonts, SflCctframc. 

CONCERNING HIS HABITUAL ABSENCE FROM CHURCH ON 
SUNDAY. 

I HAVE often wondered why you and so many 
who are engaged in mechanical pursuits should be 
so skeptical in all matters lying outside of the domain 
of material things. There seems to be something in 
the constitution of the mechanical mind, or something 
in the nature of mechanical pursuits, which tends to 
infidelity. It is notorious that, as a class, the mechan- 
ics of this country, and particularly those who are 
engaged in such branches as call for the most ingenuity 
and skill, are given to unbelief. I cannot explain this. 
I see the fact, as it exists in manufacturing commun- 
ities and in the larger cities, and am entirely at a loss 
to account for it. Why is it that constant dealing with 
the laws of matter and second causes should so induce 



116 Letters to the Jonefes. 

materialism, and so hide the Great First Cause, I do 
not know. I only know that the coldest infidels I have 
ever known — men the most utterly faithless in spiritual 
things — nien skeptical on all subjects which touch reli- 
gion and immortality, and revelation and God — are 
mechanics, and that there seems to be something in 
their pursuits, or in then* mental constitution, which 
makes them so. 

The number of these men in every New England 
community is large. We are a manufacturing people, 
and the best and most influential minds in nearly all 
our manufacturing towns are those of mechanics. I 
have been surprised at the contempt in which religion 
and its institutions are held in some New England 
towns, where it is supposed that both are honored in 
an unusual degree. The truth is that, throughout New 
England, not more than one third of the people go to 
church, or have anything to do with its support ; and 
that third is very largely composed of farmers and 
merchants. The mechanical and manufacturing inter- 
ests, notwithstanding their great magnitude, contribute 
comparatively little to the maintenance of the institu- 
tions of Christianity. None are more aware of the 
truth of the statements which I make than Christian 
mechanics, because they are constantly thrown into the 
society of those of their own class whose cold and 
sneering infidelity, and whose habitual disregard of the 



To Benjamin Franklin Jones. 117 

Sabbath and all Christian institutions, are themes of 
constant sorrow or annoyance to them. I am sorry to 
believe that you add one to the number of these faith- 
less men, and particularly sorry, because you have such 
natural strength of mind that you cannot fail to have 
great influence upon those who are nearest you — upon 
your companions and your family. But I must leave 
these general remarks, for I began with the intention 
to say something to you upon your habit of staying 
away from church on Sundays. 

You told a friend of mine the other day that you 
had not put your foot inside of a church for ten years. 
You made the statement, he informed me, in a tone 
which indicated contempt not only for the church 
itself and the religion which it represents, but for all 
the men and women who attend it. Now I like your 
frankness. There is something in your position which 
I cannot but respect. It is different from that of the 
majority of those who spend their Sundays in laziness 
or pleasure. When they are questioned with relation 
to their very questionable courses, they take the posi- 
tion of culprits at once, and make their excuses, always, 
however, protesting that they have the most profound 
respect for religion and its institutions. They make a 
merit of this respect, and put it forward as a substitute 
for the thing itself. Fools may be taken in by this 
sort of talk, but God and wise men can only have con- 



118 Letters to the Jonefes. 

tempt for those who pretend to honor a religion whose 
institutions they treat with persistent neglect. 

If we speak to some of these men about their neg- 
lect of attendance upon the Sunday ministrations of 
the church, they will say that they can worship God as 
well in the fields as they can in the sanctuary, — that 
they can commune with Him quite as well alone, among 
the beauties of nature, as in the great congregation, 
surrounded by ribbons and artificial flowers. As inde- 
pendent propositions, these may be sound. I will not 
controvert them ; but when these men put them for- 
ward, they do it for the purpose of skulking behind 
them, and they know very well that they have no rela- 
tion to their case. They know that they never wor- 
ship God in the fields, and that they would be fright- 
ened at the thought of any actual communion with 
Him. Others will denounce the impurities and imper- 
fections of the church, or find fault with the minister, 
or certain of the leading members. All kinds of apol- 
ogies are put forward by these poor men to delude 
themselves and their neighbors with the belief that 
they are really better than those who go to church — 
that they have, at least, quite as much respect for reli- 
gion as those who do. 

All this talk disgusts me, for I know that there is 
no sincerity in it. When a man tells me that he re- 
spects religion, I want to see him prove it in some 



To Benjamin Franklin Jones. 119 

practical way. If he really respects religion, he will 
give his life to it, and, as the smallest possible proof 
of respect that he can render, he will scrupulously at- 
tend upon its ordinances, and show to the world the 
side upon which he wishes his influence to count. "No, 
when men tell me that they respect religion and offer 
in evidence only their studied and persistent absence 
from all Christian ministrations, I have simply to re- 
spond that I do not respect them. They are a set of 
hypocrites and humbugs. They talk about the hypoc- 
risy of the church ! There is not such another set of 
hypocrites in America, as those who, while professing 
to respect Christianity, devote the Christian Sabbath 
to their own selfish ease or convenience, and regularly 
shun the assemblages of Christian men and women. 
Sometimes they try to prove their sincerity by throw- 
ing in their wives and children. They will tell people 
that they hire a pew, and dress their wives and chil- 
dren for the public, that they are willing that they 
should attend church, and that they have too much 
respect for religion to stand in anybody's way, while 
by every Sunday's example, they plainly declare to 
their wives and children that they regard the church 
and the religion which it represents as unworthy of the 
attention of a rational man. 

I repeat, then, that there is something in your 
position which I respect. You have brought yourself 



120 



Letters to the Jonefes. 



to the belief that Christianity is a delusion — a cheat. 
You have no respect for religion, and do not hesitate 
to express your contempt for it. All preaching is 
blarney and cant to you ; all prayer is blatant nonsense 
addressed to a phantom of the imagination. Practi- 
cally, your companions in absence from the church on 
Sunday occupy your most decidedly irreligious po- 
sition, and their weakly lingering belief in the . truth 
of Christianity, or in the possibility of its truth, (which 
is all their " respect " means,) might as well, for any 
practical purpose, be disbelief. You are really better 
than those who pretend to respect religion, and who 
treat it with the same contempt that you do, because 
you are not a hypocrite. I address you then as the 
most respectable and decent man of your class. 

My desire is to give you one or two good reasons 
for going to church which do not depend upon the 
authenticity of Christianity, or upon the sacredness of 
the Christian Sabbath at all. My first reason is that 
unless a man puts himself into a fine shirt, polished 
boots, and good clothes once a week, and goes out into 
he public, he is almost certain to sink into semi-bar- 
barism. You know that unless you do this on Sun- 
day, you cannot do it at all, for you labor all the week. 
There is nothing like isolation to work degeneration in 
a man. There is nothing like standing alone, with no 
place in the machinery of society, to tone down one's 



To Benjamin Franklin Jones. 121 

self-respect. You must be aware" that you are not in 
sympathy with society. You are looked upon as an 
outsider, because you refuse to come into contact with 
society on its broadest and best ground. I tell you it 
is a good thing for a man to wash his face clean, and 
put on his best clothes, and walk to the house of God 
with his wife and children on Sundays, whether he 
believes in Christianity or not. The church is a place 
where, at the least, good morals are inculcated, and 
where the vices of the community are denounced. You 
can afford to stand by so much of the church, and, by 
doing so, say " Here am I and here are mine, with a 
stake in the welfare of society, and an interest in the 
good morals of society." My friend, this little opera- 
tion gone through with every Sunday would give you 
self-respect, help you to keep your head above water, 
and bring you into sympathy with the best society the 
world possesses. A man needs to beautify himself 
with good clothes occasionally to assure himself that he 
is not brother to the beast by the side of which he 
labors during six days of every seven, and he needs 
particularly to feel that he has place and consideration 
in clean society. 

Another reason why you should go to church on 
Sunday is that you need the intellectual nourishment 
and stimulus which you can only get there. I suppose 

that you do not often consider the fact that the great- 
6 



122 Letters to the Jonefes. 

est amount of genuine thinking done in the world is 
done by preachers. I suppose you may never have 
reflected that, in the midst of all this din of business, 
and clashing of various interests — in the midst of the 
clamors and horrors of war, the universal pursuit of 
amusements, and the vanities and inanities of fashion, 
and the indulgence of multitudinous vices, there is a 
class of self-denying men, of the best education and 
the best talents and habits, who, in their quiet rooms, 
are thinking and writing upon the purest and noblest 
themes which can engage any mind. Among these 
men may be found the finest minds which the age 
knows — the most splendid specimens of intellectual 
power that the world contains. The bright consum- 
mate flower of our American college system is the 
American ministry. Among these men are many who 
are slow—stupid, if you insist upon it — but there is not 
one in one thousand of them who does not know more 
than you do. You can learn something of them all, 
while some of them possess more brains and more 
available intellectual power than you and all your re- 
latives combined. I tell you that if you suppose the 
American pulpit to be contemptible, you are very 
much mistaken. You have staid away from it for ten 
years. During all these ten years I have attended its 
weekly ministrations, and I have a better right to 
speak about it than you have, because I know more 



To- Benjamin Franklin Jones. 123 

about it. I tell you that I have received during these 
ten years more intellectual nourishment and stimulus 
from the pulpit than from all other sources combined, 
yet my every-day pursuits are literary while yours are 
not. 

There is something in the pursuits of working men 
— I mean of men who follow handicraft — which renders 
some intellectual feeding on Sunday peculiarly neces- 
sary. You work all day, and when yeu get home at 
night, you can do nothing but read the news, and in- 
dulge in neighborhood gossip. You are obliged to 
rise early in the morning, and that makes it necessary 
that you should go to bed early at night. You really 
have no lime for intellectual culture except on Sun- 
day, and then you are too dull and tired to sit down 
to a book. You always go to sleep over any book that 
taxes your brain at all. You know that there is noth- 
ing but the living voice which can hold your atten- 
tion, and you know that that voice can only be heard 
in the pulpit. The working man who shuns the pulpit 
on the Sabbath, voluntarily relinquishes the only regu- 
larly available intellectual nourishment of his life. 
You need not tell me that the pulpit has no intellectual 
nourishment for you. I know better. Philosophy, 
casuistry, history, metaphysics, science, poetry — these 
all are at home in the pulpit. All high moralities are 
taught there. All sweet charities are inculcated there. 



124 Letters to the Jonefes. 

There are more argument and illustration brought to 
the support and enforcement of religious truths than 
all the other intellectual magazines of the world have 
at command ; and, quarrel with the facts as you may, 
you must go to church on Sunday, and hear the preach- 
ing, or be an intellectual starveling. Your brain is 
just as certain to degenerate — your intellect is just as 
certain to grow dull — under this habit of staying at 
home from church, as a plant is to grow pale when 
hidden away from the sun. 

But you respond that you will not attend church 
because you do not believe in the doctrines that are 
preached there. Do you refuse to attend a political 
meeting which a gifted speaker is to address, because 
you are not of his way of thinking ? Do you stay 
away from the lecture of a man who has brains, because 
you cannot indorse his sentiments ? Why, you are 
behind the age, man. The most popular lecturers of 
America have for years been those who have repre- 
sented the principles and sentiments of a small mi- 
nority. Intellectual men have maintained their place 
upon the platform when their persons and their princi- 
ples were held in abhorrence by the masses whom they 
addressed. It is not necessary for me to mention 
names, to prove this statement, for the facts are too 
fresh and too notorious. Do you decline to attend a 
circus because the performers differ with you as to the 



To Benjamin Franklin Jones. 125 



number of horses it is proper for a man to ride at one 
time ? Is it possible that you, who have been charging 
bigotry upon the church and its representatives so 
long, are a bigoted man ? Is it possible that you, who 
have denounced the American Christian ministry for 
intolerance, are intolerant yourself ? It looks like it. 

My friend, you are lame in this matter. Your 
position is a very weak one. 4 It is not based in any 
principle — it is based in prejudice. Besides, you are 
not truthful when you say that the utterances of the 
pulpit generally are incredible. I have been a constant 
attendant at church all my life, and I declare without 
hesitation that three quarters of the sermons I have 
heard have been other than doctrinal sermons. The 
majority of the sermons preached have their founda- 
tion in the eternal principles of right — in the broad 
moralities to which you and every other decent man 
subscribes. You know that, as a system of morals, 
Christianity is faultless. You know that if the world 
should live up to the morals of Christianity — we will 
say nothing about it as a system of religion — there 
would be no murder, no war, no slavery, no drunken- 
ness, no licentiousness, no lying, no stealing, no cheat- 
ing, no wrong, — that everywhere men would walk in 
peace and concord and fraternal affection, and that the 
golden rule would be the universal rule of life. The 
pulpit is the spot of all others in the world where, 



126 Letters to the Jonefes. 

through the wonderful agency of the human voice, 
these morals are taught ; and do you tell me that you 
will not go to church because you do not believe in 
what is taught there ? You do believe in at least three 
quarters of the teachings of the pulpit. You do your- 
self great wrong by holding yourself aloof from an 
institution which would not only nourish your intellect, 
but instruct and confirm you in those moralities which 
are the only safeguard of that society which numbers 
among its members your wife and children. 

Perhaps you can afford, or feel that you can afford, 
to teach your children that Christianity, as a system of 
religion, is a cheat, but you cannot afford to confound 
with it, and condemn with it, the moralities of Christian- 
ity. You cannot afford to teach your children by words 
or deeds that the great mass of the teachings of the pul- 
pit are unworthy of consideration ; for their safety, their 
respectability, their prosperity, their happiness, all de- 
pend upon the adoption and practice of Christian morals. 
Do you teach them Christian morals ? Are you care- 
ful to sit down on the Sabbath, or at any other time, 
and instruct them in those moralities that are essential 
to the right and happy issue of their lives ? My friend, 
you have not the face to do any such thing, for your 
position will not permit you to do it without shame. 
Well, if you refuse to do it, who will ? Unhappily 
your wife is quite as much under your influence as your 



To Benjamin Franklin Jones 127 

children, and unless those children go to church on 
Sunday, they will get no instruction in Christian 
morals whatever, except such as they may pick up at 
the public schools. 

These children of yours are not to blame for being 
in the world. They came forth from nothingness in 
answer to your call, and they are on your hands. You 
are responsible to them, at least, for their right train- 
ing. You are in -personal honor bound to give them 
such instruction in morals as will tend to preserve to 
them health of body and mind, and honorable relations 
with society. How will you do it ? By telling them 
that church-going is foolishness, and Sabbath-keeping 
nonsense, and the teachings of the pulpit only the 
tricks of priestcraft and the amusement of blockheads ? 
No, sir. You must take these children by the hand 
and lead them to church, and show that there are, at 
least, some things that come from the pulpit which 
you respect. It will not be enough that you send them 
and their mother. You must go with them, for, if 
you do not, they will soon learn the realities of the 
pulpit, and, in learning them, learn to pity you, and to 
hold your intolerance in contempt. You must stand 
by the pulpit as the great teacher of private and pub- 
lic morality, or do an awful injustice to the children 
for whose life and healthy education you are re- 
sponsible. 



THE NINTH LETTER. 

€a Wte£$x($Bn gtllsfon fotus. 

CONCERNING THE POLICY OF MAKING HIS BRAINS 
MARKETABLE. 

JUDGING from recent conversations with you, and 
from many things I have heard about you, you 
are not satisfied with the results of your life, thus far. 
You have tried various fields of effort, and have failed 
of the success you sought in all. You know my honest 
friendship for you, and the measurable respect which 
I entertain not only for your intellectual gifts, but for 
that high ideal of art and its mission which has been 
the only bar to your reward. You wrote a novel, 
which failed, simply because you refused to write one 
which would succeed. You erected a standard in your 
own soul, bowed to your standard, and then was dis- 
gusted because the humanity upon which you had 



To Wafliington Allfton Jones. 129 

turned your back would not applaud your doings. You 
wrote a poem, classical without a doubt — powerful and 
beautiful in its way beyond question — but, somehow, 
the poem had no point of sympathy with the age which 
you believed ought to receive and love it. Behind 
these two books you sat in imperial pride, disgusted 
with a world which seemed so little in knowledge and 
so low in feeling — so unable to appreciate you, and so 
ready to give its applause to men of slenderer faculty 
and shallower motive. Will you permit me to say to 
you now, before it is too late, that the world will never 
come to you, and that you must go to the world or die 
voiceless ? 

My friend, the world is not in want, just at this 
time, of life-size portraits in oil, with all their stately 
conventional accompaniments. The world happens to 
want photographs, and will have nothing but photo- 
graphs. You choose to stand by your pigments and 
your canvas and your camel's hair, and to starve, while 
all the world rushes by you to patronize the sun. You 
imagine that it would degrade you to have anything to 
do with photographs. You would not make one — you 
would not color one — you would not touch one with 
one of your fingers, because your idea of art, or what 
you choose to consider art, is so high, that you could 
have nothing to do with the production of a photo- 
graph without a sense of humiliation. You will die 
6* 



130 Letters to the Jonefes. 

rather than disgrace the art to which you are in honor 
married, and degrade the standard you have erected 
for yourself. Die, my friend, if it will be any satisfac- 
tion to you ; but the world will never thank you for 
it, and, moreover, will vote you a fool for your volun- 
tary sacrifice. The only way for you is to meet the 
want of the world and make photographs — make the 
best photographs the world has seen — so that it shall 
come to you and ask you to do it favors, and beg 
the privilege of paying you much honor and much 
money. 

I confess to you again that I have a measurable 
respect for that ideal of art which refuses all com- 
promise with popular prejudice, and, standing alone, 
strives to compel the homage of the world, and failing, 
stands in self-complacent pride to pity and despise 
those who will not bow to it. Yet this ideal, upon 
which the issue of your life seems to be turning, has in 
it, to a fatal degree, the element of selfishness. My 
friend, what is art but a minister ? What is art but a 
vehicle by which you may transport the life which is 
m you to the souls by which you are surrounded — for 
their good, and not for yours ? Cut off from its rela- 
tions to life — to the life which produces it, and that to 
which it is addressed — standing by itself— what is art 
but a phantom ? — a nothing with a name ? God has 
endowed you with intellectual wealth. He has given 



To Wafhington Allfton Jones. 131 

you great powers, and set you upon a throne where 
you can reason and judge and reach outward and up- 
ward into great imaginations ; he has given you the 
power to speak and to sing. For what purpose ? Is 
it that you may selfishly shut this wealth of yours into 
a coffer, and close the lips of your utterance, from obe- 
dience to a standard of art which has more reference 
to you than to the world to which you owe service ? 
You are rich and must dispense. Who gave you your 
wealth ? Is it for you to stand and higgle with the 
world about the form or style in which it shall receive 
your gifts ? Is it for you to declare that the world 
shall have none of your expression, unless it be accept- 
ed in a certain form, which form shall have supreme 
consideration ? 

You have carried your reverence for your idea of 
art and your contempt for those who will not regard it 
so far that you cannot speak with patience of those 
who succeed in the fields which have witnessed your 
failure. You have learned to despise those whom the 
world applauds, because you think the world's applause 
can only be won by treachery to art. This contempt 
for those who succeed is the logical result of your own 
failure ; and now you sit alone, in selfish pride, a mar- 
tyr, as you suppose, to your better ideal and your high- 
er aim, the world unconscious meanwhile that you have 
in you the power to move and bless it. You have told 



132 Letters to the Jonefes. 

me that you distrust a book which sells, and hare 
spoken with undisguised contempt of men who carry 
"marketable brains," as you were pleased to call 
them. 

And now we get at our subject. What are brains 
good for that are not marketable ? My belief is that 
a man who has brains is in duty bound to mate them 
marketable. My position is that unless mind, under 
Christian direction and control, is marketable, it is use- 
less ; and you must permit me to use the word market- 
able in the largest sense. The world is as we find it 
— not as we would have it. We write, we speak, we 
paint, we give utterance to all forms of art, in order 
to make the world richer and better ; and unless the 
world will receive what we utter, and take it into its 
life, it is not benefited, and our utterance is a failure. 
There are doubtless a few great souls, laboring in some 
difficult departments of art, that must labor for the 
few, and through these few find their way to the 
world, but these are exceptional cases. Yours is not 
one, for you have undertaken only to address the 
world at large, and it is your fault that you have 
failed. You would not take the world as you found it. 
You intended that the world should take you as it 
found you. You did not go to the world to sell, 
throwing yourself into its markets, but you stood at 
your own door, determined to compel the world to 



To Wafhington Allfton Jones. 133 

come to you and buy. The world did not come, and I 
do not blame it. 

In intellectual no less than in commercial affairs, 
the market is the first consideration. The manufac- 
turer never adopts one style of fabric as that to which 
alone his efforts at production shall be devoted, but 
studies the market, and shifts his machinery and modi- 
fies his material in accordance with the indications of 
the market. We hear of certain preachers who preach 
great sermons, such as a few only love to hear, or have 
the power to remember and appropriate. They have 
no right to preach such sermons. If they have any 
gold in them, they should reduce it to coin that will 
pass current with the people. There is a stiff and 
stilted set in occupation of many of the American pul- 
pits, who suspect a preacher who is very popular, and 
hold in contempt him who places himself in thorough 
sympathy with the crowd around him that he may 
reach and hold them, and who are particularly dis- 
gusted with what they call " sensation preaching." It 
seems better to them to preach to small congregations 
than to draw large houses by making their preaching 
marketable. Is this being all things to all men, that 
they may save some ? Not at all. It is being one 
thing to a few men, whether they save any or not. St. 
Paul understood the matter of making his intellectual 
gifts and his preaching marketable. "We know writers 



134 Letters to the Jonefes. 

of magnificent powers — some of them who are certainly 
very greatly your superiors in mental acquisitions — 
who are burying their gifts in books that find no buy- 
ers. These men might as well be horseblocks, so far 
as the world is concerned. They are doing nothing 
for the world. They have not consulted its market, 
and appear to know and care nothing about its wants. 
We know orators who never let themselves down to 
minister to the desire of those whom they address to 
be melted and moved, but who, with stately dignity, 
insist on being rational and dull, and on driving from 
them those whom they desire to hold. 

You, my friend, sympathize with all these men, but 
do you not see how much a selfish pride lies at the 
basis of their action ? I give you and them credit for 
that self-respect which shrinks from the tricks of the 
mountebank and the demagogue, but I charge you and 
them with a pride which is not consistent with the 
position of the artist as a minister of life. With all 
your nobleness of nature, you have never been able to 
conceive of a higher motive of action, in a literary man, 
than the ambition to achieve literary distinction. You 
do not understand how a man can undertake a literary 
enterprise which has not literary reputation for its ob- 
ject ; and when some book is uttered for the simple 
purpose of doing good, by one who has it in him to do 
great things for himself— a book which does not even 



To Wafliington Allfton Jones. 135 

pretend to literary merit beyond that which lies in 
adapting means to ends — you curl your lip in contempt 
for his voluntary degradation. He writes for a mar- 
ket, and the world accepts him, and he does the world 
good ; and if he did not write for a market, the world 
would spurn him as it spurns you ; and he would be 
deprived as you are of the privilege of doing the world 
good. 

I suppose you hug to yourself the delusion that 
you are in advance of your age, and that what it fails 
to appreciate, posterity will receive at its full value. 
To leave out of consideration the selfishness of this 
fancy — as if you and your reputation were the only 
things to be taken into account — let me assure you that 
the coming age will have its own heroes to look after, 
and will stand a very small chance of stumbling upon 
your dead novel and your still-born poem. Sir, the 
only way for you to win the reputation which I know 
you desire, is to throw your life — your thinking and 
acting self — into this age, as a power to uplift and 
mould and bless it. You must come into the market. 
You must shape your utterances to the want of the 
times. You must be content to work for others, for- 
getful of yourself, and to give to men, in cups from 
which they will drink it, that life with' which God has 
filled you. 

But you despise your age. The age has not treated 



136 Letters to the Jonefes. 

you well. The age is vulgar and low and rude and 
ungrateful. The age is mercenary and immoral. Your 
wounded self-love has misled you, sir. You are living 
in the greatest age of the world, and your soul only 
needs to be attuned to its great movements and events 
to find itself coined into words for their majestic 

music. 

" Every age 
Appears to souls who live in it (ask Carlyle) 
Most unheroic. Ours, for instance, ours ! 
The thinkers scout it and the poets abound 
Who scorn to touch it with a finger-tip : 
A pewter age— mixed metal, silver- washed ; 
An age of scum, spooned off the richer past ; 
An age of patches for old gaberdines ; 
An age of mere transition, meaning nought 
Except that what succeeds must shame it quite, 
If God please." 
And now, as I have broached Mrs. Browning upon 
this point, I will go farther and let her sing the rest 
of my paragraph : 

"Nay, if there's room for poets in the world 
A little overgrown (I think there is), 
Their sole work is to represent the age — 
Their age, not Charlemagne's— this live, throbbing age, 
That brawls, cheats, maddens, calculates, aspires, 
And spends more passion, more heroic heat, 
Betwixt the mirrors of its drawing rooms, 
Than Roland with his knights at Roncesvalles. 
To flinch from modern varnish, coat, or flounce. 
Cry out for togas and the picturesque, 
Is fatal— foolish too. * * * 



To Washington Allfton Jones. 137 

"Never flinch, 
But, still unscrupulously epic, catch 
Upon the burning lava of a song 
The full-veined, heaving, double-breasted age ; 
That, when the next shall come, the men of that 
May touch the impress with reverent hand, and say, 
1 Behold — behold the paps we all have sucked ! ' " 

" This is living art, 
Which thus presents and thus records true life." 

Do what you can to make your age great. Be alike 
its minister and its mouthpiece. Give yourself to your 
age, and your age will take care of you, and the ages 
to come will be the guardians of your fame. 

When you spoke to me of " marketable brains," I 
understood you of course to use the phrase in a lower 
sense than that in which I have used it. I have not 
adopted your meaning, simply because it walks in the 
shadow of mine. A man who adapts the products of 
his brain to the real wants of the world, is the man 
who sells his books and makes money by them. You 
ought to be sensible enough to know that a man who 
writes from no higher motive than the desire to win 
money, cannot meet the wants of the world, and that 
he who writes a marketable book must necessarily be 
something better than a mercenary wretch who would 
sell all that is godlike in him for gold. Yet I will ad- 
mit that the desire to win bread — nay, the ambition to 
acquire a competent wealth — is, in its subordinate 



138 Letters to the Jonefes. 

place, a worthy motive in impelling the artist to make 
his brains marketable. Commerce puts its brains into 
the market, and nobody cries out " shame," or hints at 
humiliation. The brains of all this working, trading, 
scheming world are in the market. These " marketable 
brains " are the pabulum of progress everywhere ; and a 
writer is good for nothing for the world who does not 
understand what it is to work for a living — what it is 
to expend life for the means of continuing life. Nay, 
I would go farther, and say that God has, by direct 
intent, compelled the worker in all departments of art 
to make his brains marketable, under penalty of 
starving. 

I know, my friend, that this is all very disgusting 
to you. You feel that the artist ought to be kingj and 
that grateful men should only be too glad to do homage 
and bring gifts to him. You are wrong. The people 
are kings, and you are their servant. The law an- 
nounced by the Great Teacher on this point is univer- 
sal, and without exception. A man is felt to be great 
only by reason of his power to minister to the life 
around him. Life licks the hand that feeds it. You 
think it a degradation to go to the world with your 
brains, adapting their product to the popular want, and 
taking your pay in the currency of the country ; but it 
is this or something worse. Think of those kings of 
the old English literature, who were obliged to sit and 



To Walhington Allfton Jones. 139 

sneak in the anterooms of nobles, and beg the patron- 
age of the rich and great, and become lickspittles for 
the sake of the influence that would sell their books, 
and give them position, and furnish them with bread 
to starve on and a garret to die in. The world will 
not buy what it does not want, and you are unreason- 
able if you blame it. You thirst for the world's praise, 
you need its money, you really envy the success of 
others, and because praise and money and success are 
denied you, you button your coat to your chin, turn up 
your nose to the world, and, " grand, gloomy, and pe- 
culiar," stand apart. 

You mistake entirely if you suppose the world to 
be a contemptible master ; and this failure to appre- 
ciate the world — this persistent under-estimate of the 
world — which you and all of your class entertain, is 
enough to account for your failure. The world deals 
with practical life, and is guided by, experience and 
common sense. The world is at work to win bread 
and raiment and shelter. The world digs the field, 
and searches the seas, and trades, and manufactures, 
and builds railroads and telegraphs and ships, and 
prints and reads newspapers. The world is full of the 
cares of government. The world fights battles and 
pays taxes. The world is under a great pressure of 
care and work. This working, trading, fighting, care- 
ful world holds within itself the great, vital forces of 






140 Letters to the Jonefes. 

society, the practical interests of humanity, the wisest, 
brightest, noblest minds that live. And this world, for 
which you have such contempt, is the only competent 
judge of the artist, and is always the final judge of 
art. " The light of the public square will test its val- 
ue," said Michael Angelo to the young sculptor whose 
work he was examining. The remark was the bow of 
a respectful servant to his master. You can write for 
dillettanti if you choose — for an audience " fit, though 
few " — for the fellows of the mutual admiration socie- 
ty — and they will praise you ; but you know that if 
you fail to get hold of this world which you affect to 
despise, you are powerless and without reward as a 
literary man. 

As I think of your kingly gifts of intellect, and of 
the power there is in you to bless mankind, art itself 
appears before me in the likeness of Him who wore 
the seamless robe among humble disciples, and the 
crown of thorns between thieves. Ah ! when art be- 
comes the mediator between genius and the world, 
then does it answer to its noblest ideal, and confer the 
greatest glory upon the artist. You, in your realm, 
are almost as incomprehensible and unapproachable 
by the world as God was, before He expressed His 
love and His practical good will through the gift of 
The Beloved. He had wrought augustly in the heav- 
ens, and filled the earth with glory. He had crowded 



To Wafhington Allfton Jones. 141 

immensity with the tokens of His power and the ex- 
pressions of His majestic thought ; but the world did 
not see Him — would not receive Him — regarded Him 
without reverence. Why should He not despise the 
world ? Why, falling hack upon the dignity of His 
Godhood, and sufficient for himself, did He not spurn 
the race which so disgraced itself and Him ? Ah ! He 
pitied. He respected the characteristics of the nature 
He had made. He sent the choicest child of His Infin- 
ite Bosom down into the world to wear its humblest 
garb, and eat its homeliest fare, and perform its mean- 
est offices, and die its most terrible and disgraceful 
death, that the world might drink through Him the 
life of the Everlasting Father. My friend, send your 
mediator into the world. Send the child of your 
bosom, clad in humble garments — charged only with a 
mission of love and practical good will to men. Let 
me assure you that you can only bring the world to 
love you and learn of you by making it the partaker 
of your life through some expression of art which it 
can appropriate. No matter if it die. It shall rise 
again, and when it rises, rise to you, drawing all men 
unto it and unto you. 



THE TENTH LETTER. 

&n %ib lettmrcfr lows, g.g. 

CONCERNING TEE FAILURE OF HIS PULPIT MINISTRY 

I NEVER should have undertaken this letter to 
you, had I not been requested to do so by one of 
your professional brethren. It is not a pleasant thing 
to find fault with people, particularly with those whose 
faults are the results of natural organization. My object 
in finding fault at any time, with any person, is reform ; 
and you can never reform. You cannot make yourself 
over again, into something different and better ; and 
this ink of mine will be wasted, unless it shall address 
other eyes than yours. The assurance that other eyes 
will be interested in what I have to say to you deter- 
mines me to write this letter. 

Surveying the American pulpit, I find it occupied 
by men who can legitimately be divided into two great 



To Rev. Jeremiah Jones, D. D. 143 

classes, and these, for the present purpose, I will call 
the poetical and the unpoetical. I am not sure that 
these designations are sufficiently definite, or even suffi- 
ciently suggestive, but I can tell you what I mean by 
them. The class which I denominate poetical is com- 
posed of men who possess imagination, strong and ten- 
der sympathies, profound insight into human character 
and motive, and the power to attract to themselves the 
affections of those around them. These men possess 
also what we term individuality in an unusual degree — 
a quality which carries with it the power to transmute 
truth into life — to resolve systems into character — to 
appropriate, digest, and assimilate all spiritual food 
whatsoever, so that when they preach they do not 
preach as the mouthpieces of a school, or a sect, or a 
system, but as revelators and promulgators of a life. 
These are the preachers who touch men, because they 
preach out of their own life and experience. These 
are the men who speak from the heart and reach the 
heart— the men who possess what, for lack of a better 
name, we call magnetism. The unpoetical class may 
roughly be defined by the statement that they are the 
opposites of the poetical. They have no imagination ; 
they are not men of strong and tender sympathies ; 
they do not possess fine insight (though some of them 
possess a degree of cunning which is mistaken for ft) ; 
they have not the power to attract to themselves the 



144 Letters to the Jonefes. 

affections of those around them ; they do not possess 
true individuality (though they may have peculiarities or 
idiosyncracies which pass for it) ; and, in their utter- 
ances, they are little more than the mouthpieces of 
the systems and schools to which they are attached. 

To the latter class I assign you without the slight- 
est hesitation, because nature has placed you in it. I 
have no expectation that you will ever be different 
from what you are. It is possible that some terrible 
affliction or some great humiliation will soften your 
character, and develop your heart, and quicken your 
sympathies, but I could hardly pray for such discipline 
as would be necessary to revolutionize your constitu- 
tion. "No sir ; you will probably live and die the same 
sort of a man you always have been — useful in some 
respects, self-complacent in all respects— an irreproach- 
able, unlovable, sound, solid, dogmatic doctor of di- 
vinity. 

I give you credit for an honest Christian character 
and purpose, but I should be false to my convictions 
should I fail to tell you that I consider you and all who 
are like you to be out of place in the Christian pulpit. 
Your religion is mostly a matter of intellect. You are 
fond of preaching doctrine. You delight in what you 
are pleased to denominate theology. You rejoice in a 
controversy. You speak as by authority. You de- 
nounce sin, as if you had never sinned, and never ex- 



To Rev. Jeremiah Jones, D. D. 145 

pected to sin. You unfold what yon call " the scheme 
of salvation " as if it were a grand contrivance of the 
Supreme Being to circumvent Himself — a marvellous 
invention by which He is enabled to harmonize His 
justice with His pity. Tou have a " system of truth " 
to promulgate, and, in your mind, it seems essential 
that this system should be accepted in all its parts as 
the condition of salvation. You are, indeed, the spe- 
cial guardian of the orthodoxy of your region. Alas ! 
for the poor candidate for the Christian ministry who 
may be obliged to pass under your examination ! Alas ! 
for any person who may presume to decide that a man 
can be a Christian without embracing your " system 
of truth," or that religion is not quite as much a mat- 
ter of the brains as of the heart ! You lug along into 
this present age, to its scandal and its shame, to the 
detriment and disgrace of the Christian cause, the old 
Puritan idea that assent to a creed — that belief in cer- 
tain dogmas— has more to do with the soundness of a 
man's Christianity than anything else. You do not 
ask, first and foremost, in your inquiries concerning a 
man, whether his life is pure — pious toward God and 
loving and benevolent toward men — but whether he is 
sound in his "views." At this very moment, while 
you are reading these words, you are wondering, not 
whether I am a Christian man, loving and serving God 
and men, but whether I am orthodox or heterodox in 
1 



146 Letters to the Jonefes. 

my " views ; " and because I hold your frigid scholas- 
ticism in contempt, you regard me as " loose " in my 
" views," and, on the whole, dangerous in my teach- 
ings. Tell me, doctor, if it is not so ? Have you not 
been troubled more with doubts about my orthodoxy, 
while reading this paragraph, than anything else ? 

Will you be offended if I reveal to you the nature 
of your Sabbath ministrations, and endeavor to show 
you why you cannot hope to accomplish very much for 
your Master? Your manner is not humble — your 
spirit is not humble. You do not enter your church 
on Sunday morning crushed with a sense of your 
responsibility — feeling the need of aid and inspiration 
— filled with tender reverence toward God and love 
toward man. Your utterances are those of a self- 
sufficient man. Your prayers touch nobody. They 
are full of sonorous phrases culled from the sacred 
text; they abound in passages of information ad- 
dressed to the Deity ; they embrace all the objects of 
Christian solicitude and labor ; they range the earth 
through all the degrees of latitude and longitude for 
subjects ; the sailor, the soldier, the heathen, the Jews, 
the Roman Catholics and all other errorists, the for- 
eign missionaries, the home missionaries, the civil au- 
thorities — all these come in by catalogue. These 
broad generalities of petition, which do not grow, as 
you very well know, out of any immediate impulse 



* To Rev. Jeremiah Jones, D. D. 147 

of desire, but only out of a general impression of de- 
sirableness, have not the slightest power to lead a con- 
gregation in genuine prayer. The thing sounds well. 
The words are well chosen and well pronounced, but 
they do not lift a heart to its Maker, or give voice to 
the aspirations of a single soul. 

Your sermon is like your prayer, and carries with 
it the idea that you are safe, and comparatively inde- 
pendent. It is as if you were to stand in your pulpit, 
and say : " Here am I, Rev. Jeremiah Jones, D. D., 
safe, by the grace of God, forever, with a message to 
deliver. Repent and believe what I believe, and you 
will be saved; refuse to repent and believe what I 
believe, and you will be damned. Take things in my 
way, see things as I see them, adopt my opinions and 
my system, and you will be all right. If you do not, 
then you will be all wrong, and I wash my hands of 
all responsibility for your destruction." Salvation 
would seem, in your scheme, to be a matter of ma- 
chinery. You preach just what you were taught to 
preach at the theological seminary, and have not taken 
a single step in advance. It is the same old brain- 
stuff, unsoftened by a better love, unfertilized by a 
better experience, without life or the power to enrich 
life. You put before your hearers a skeleton, and 
hold them responsible for not seeing and admitting 
that it is a beautiful form of life. You give them a 



148 Letters to the Jonefes. 

system and a scheme, when they need a life and a 
heart. You insist on driving them by threats to Him 
who, with a different spirit and different policy, said 
" Come unto me." 

Do not understand me to blame you for all this, for 
you cannot very well help it. I only state the matter 
in detail, to prove that the pulpit is not the place for 
you. You are honest enough, but you have no sensi- 
bility. You have mind enough, but you have none of' 
that poetic or spiritual insight which enables other 
men to seize the essence of that scheme of truths with 
whose adjustment into form and system you so con- 
stantly busy yourself. I once entered the study of a 
preacher who had been for three months out of public 
employment, and who, to demonstrate to me his in- 
dustry, assured me that he had written during that 
period thirty-six sermons. Indeed, he showed me the 
pile. Now there was a job which you could have done 
just as well as he, but neither you nor he, nor any 
other man who could do it, is fit to write a sermon at 
all. Moved by no special want of the souls around 
him, taking no suggestions from the living time, he 
wrote sermons — very sound sermons, doubtless — but 
sermons with no more power in them to move meh 
than there is in a mathematical proposition. You seem 
to feel that the truth is the truth, and that if you 
promulgate it with an honest purpose, it is all that is 



To Rev. Jeremiah Jones, D. D. 149 

necessary. Men occasionally find their way into your 
pulpit, however, to whom your congregation give their 
hearts before they have uttered ten sentences, and 
why? The heart instinctively acknowledges the cre- 
dentials of its teacher. There is something about some 
men, in the pulpit, which draws my heart to them at 
once. I know by their bearing, by the sound of their 
voices, by every emanation of their personality, that 
their hearts are on a sympathetic level with all hu- 
manity — that they are bowing tearfully under their 
own burden while they help to bear mine — that they 
are my fellows in temptation, in struggle, in aspira- 
tion. 

This poetic instinct — this power to reach through 
words and phrases, and forms and types and figures, 
and to grasp the naked truths of which they are only 
the representatives — is essential to any man who feeds 
the people. You are fond of creeds and catechisms ; 
and those who listen to you are instructed in creeds 
and catechisms ; but you might just as hopefully under- 
take to make a living tree out of dry chips, as a 
living Christian out of creeds and catechisms. This 
poetic instinct or power is the solvent of creeds and 
catechisms — the gastric juice that softens them into 
chyle, and the absorbents that suck from them tiaeir 
vital fluid for the soul's nourishment. But why do I 
talk to you about this poetic faculty? Ton do not 



150 Letters to the Jonefes. 

understand me. You do not comprehend me at all. 
You think that I am foggy and fanciful — transcenden- 
tal and nonsensical ; but it is you — stolid pretender to 
solidity and sound sense — who are foggy and fanciful. 
You think and call yourself a matter-of-fact man, when 
you are only a matter-of-form man. The poet is the 
man who touches facts. The poet is the man of com- 
mon sense, who finds and reveals the inner life and 
meaning of things ? The true poet in a free pulpit is 
a man in his place, and no other man is fit for the 
place. When the true poet speaks from the pulpit, the 
people hear ; and they will hear gladly no other man. 
He is the only man who can reveal a congregation to 
itself. The great charm of The Great Teacher to the 
woman at the well was His power to tell her all the 
things that ever she did, and that was her sole recom- 
mendation of Him to those of her friends whom she 
invited into His presence. 

There are not so many preachers of your class in 
the world now as there were once, thank God ! It was 
this "brain Christianity — this intellectualism — this scho- 
lasticism — that gave root to those great controversies 
and schisms which disgraced Christianity, alike in the 
judgment of history and the eyes of a faithless world. 
Pride of theological opinion, sectarian partisanship, 
strifes of words, splittings of hairs, formalisms, — these 
have been the curse of Christianity and the clog upon 



To Rev. Jeremiah Jones, D. D. 151 

its progress in all ages. You and those who are like 
you have made a complicated and difficult thing of that 
which is exquisitely simple. You have surrounded that 
fountain which flows with a volume of sparkling bounty 
for the cleansing and the healing of all humanity, 
with hedges of words and forms, and conditions and 
prejudices ; yet you are too blind to see it. But I see 
your class fading out, and another and a better coming 
in, and I mark with gratitude the change in the general 
aspect of the Christian enterprise. The differences 
between sects are growing small by degrees and beau- 
tifully less. Brother grasps the hand of brother across 
the chasms which the fathers made. Names do not 
separate as they once did those whom the common re- 
ception of the vital truths of Christianity has made one. 
Love unites those whom logic and learning have long 
divided. And you, sir, with your dry doctrinal dis- 
courses, your array of redemptive machinery, your de- 
nunciations and threatenings, your fulminations against 
opposing sects, your pride of opinion and your hard 
and unpoetic nature, are out of place in a pulpit that is 
already far in advance of you. 

I recently addressed a letter to an intelligent rela- 
tive of yours concerning his habit of staying away from 
the church on the Sabbath. I found serious fault with 
him for his delinquencies in this respect. I undertook 
to present to him sufficient reasons for reform, and 



152 Letters to the Jonefes. 

prominently among those reasons I stated that he 
needed the intellectual stimulus which, in his circum- 
stances, he would only secure by attendance on the 
ministrations of the pulpit. I do not retract what I 
said to him at all. I should advise him to hear you 
preach, rather than to hear nobody, spending his Sab- 
baths in idleness ; yet I cannot hide from you the fact 
that you and those who are like you are responsible to 
a great extent for the thinly attended Christian meet- 
ings of the Sabbath. I cannot help feeling that those 
preachers who find themselves without power to draw 
men to them by the beauty of their lives and charac- 
ters, and by the adaptedness of their teachings to the 
popular want, and by that magnetism of poetic or 
spiritual sympathy which is the heavenly baptism, are 
doing more than they imagine to depopulate the 
churches. I confess to no small degree of sympathy 
with those who prefer staying at home to hearing you 
preach ; for though I am sometimes stirred intellectually 
by you, I am never moved religiously and spiritually. 

Look at the churches with me for a moment, my 
reverend friend, and mark what you see. Here is a 
church with a man in the pulpit of great intellectual 
gifts and excellent scholarship. His sermons are 
models of English composition. He is known in all 
the churches as a sound man. Look over his congre* ' 
gation: two, three, four, in a pew — old men, steady 



To Rev. Jeremiah Jones, D. D. 153 

men, pious women — some asleep — all decorous. You 
will see the same sight fifty-two Sundays of the year. 
The teaching is good enough, but there is no motion. 
The instruction is sound, but there is no impulse. How 
many respectable, sleepy, sound preachers and churches 
do you suppose there are in this country which show 
no change from Sabbath to Sabbath and from year to 
year, and which make no aggressive inroads upon the 
worldly life which environs them? Well, here is 
another church, whose preacher never was celebrated 
for the soundness of his " views " — who, indeed, never 
paid very much attention to his " views ; " but who tried 
to do something — tried to introduce a new life into his 
church and into the community in which he lived. 
What is there about this man that draws the crowd 
to him ? He is not so intellectual as his neighbor ; he 
is not so good a scholar as his neighbor ; he cannot 
write so fine a sermon as his neighbor, but he draws a 
church full of people. The young flock to him ; his 
Sunday school is the largest to be found for many 
miles around him, and his church is recognized as a 
thing of power and progress. This man has reached 
the hearts of his people, through the sympathies of his 
poetic nature. He has touched them where they live 
— not where they think. He has melted them, moulded 
them, moved them. I tell you, sir, that thin churches 
are very much attributable to thin ministers — not thin 

7* 

L_ __ 



154 Letters to the Jonefes. 



in brains, or scholarship, but thin in heart and thin in 
human sympathy and thin in spirituality — thin where 
they should be thickest. 

You, Dr. Jones, and your brethren of the pulpit, 
very rarely get honestly talked to from the pews, but 
you could learn a great deal more from them than you 
imagine, if they would talk to you honestly. You rarely 
hear the truth. Your friends praise you, and your ene- 
mies shun you. Let me say to you this : that when you 
preach you preach with such an air of authority, and 
such an assumption of superiority, and such an ap- 
parent lack of sympathy with my weaknesses and 
trials, that I find myself rising in opposition to you. 
I think that all those hearts which have not schooled 
themselves to accept your teachings as they are ren- 
dered, are affected as mine is. Do not deceive your- 
self with the thought that these feelings are the off- 
spring of depravity, for they are no such thing. They 
are the spirit's protest against your right to teach. 
Yery differently do many other men affect me; Ah ! 
well do I remember one, sleeping now within a few rods 
of where I write, and waking uncounted miles away 
beyond the blue ether that draws the veil between my 
eyes and heaven, who took my heart in his hand when- 
ever it pleased him. He had an intellect as bright and 
keen and strong as yours, but his power was not in 
that. He preached more a sermon that a tasteful 



To Rev. Jeremiah Jones, D. D. 155 

scholar would call brilliant, but his power was not in 
the brilliancy of his sermons. His power was in his 
sanctified, spiritualized humanity, that never blamed 
but always pitied me, that took me in its charitable 
arms and blessed me, that held my hand and gave me 
loving fellowship, that unselfishly poured out its life 
that the life of all humanity might be raised to a higher 
level. You are too great in your own estimation. Ton 
are too much impressed with your own dignity. He 
was Humility's personification, and carried a sense of his 
anworthiness as a constant burden. Ah ! my friend, 
have you not learned that the weak do not commit 
their burdens to the strong ? Learn of your children, 
then, who seeK for refuge in their mother's slender 
arms and not -in yours. 

I told you at the outset that I had no expectation 
of reforming you, because it is not in you to be re- 
formed. You lack the insight to apprehend spiritual 
things ; you are harsh ; you are coarse ; you dwell in 
forms and phrases ; you are constitutionally imperious ; 
you are not sympathetic ; you are not tempted as other 
men are. This lack of sympathy in your nature has cut 
you off from participation in the severest trials and 
struggles that ever visit the Christian soul. You cannot 
have charity for others. But there are some who will 
read this letter and gather perhaps a valuable hint from 
it. It will not have been written in vain if one 



156 Letters to the Jonefes. 

preacher learns that his power and usefulness in the 
pulpit do not reside either in the orthodoxy or the 
heterodoxy of his " views," do not reside in any system 
of theology or in any intellectual power, but do reside 
in. a spiritual life, which, acting through its sympathies, 
by apprehension of and application to human need, 
nourishes, elevates and spiritualizes human character. 



THE ELEVENTH LETTER. 

CONCERNING THE BEST WAY OF SPENDING HIS MONET. 

THE art least understood in this country, where 
money is made easily and quickly, is that of 
spending it wisely and well. Most men think that if 
they could make money they would run the risk of 
spending it properly; and these same men criticise 
their fortunate neighbors ; yet it is doubtless true that 
the poor do not monopolize the wisdom of the world, 
and that if they were to change places with the rich 
money would be no better spent than it is now. There 
are enough poor men who succeed, from time to time, 
in getting rich, to show that wealth rarely brings with 
it the wisdom which will dispense it with comfort and 
credit to its possessor and with genuine benefit to the 
world. Of how few men of wealth can it be said that 



158 Letters to the Jonefes. 

they spend their money well! One is niggardly, 
another is lavish ; one runs into sports and debauch- 
eries, another into extravagance in equipage ; one apes 
the fashionable, or does what he can to buy social 
position, another separates himself from others by 
using his money to thrust his personal eccentricities 
before the public ; one expends thousands in ostenta- 
tious charities, and there is occasionally one who im- 
poverishes himself and his family by his improvident 
beneficence. Caprice and impulse seem to govern the 
spending of money more than principle, with the large 
majority of those who have money to spend. 

It is a good sign for a man who has made money to 
take to spending it in any way that is not vicious. It 
usually shows that he is getting over the excitement 
of pursuit — that the pleasures of seeking wealth are 
beginning to pall, and that his heart is looking for a 
fresh delight. It seems to me to be a good sign, I say, 
for a man to reach this point, for it proves that he is 
not a miser. When a man can content himself with 
a never-ending search for wealth, or rather, when a 
rich man can be content with the pleasure of adding to 
wealth which he can never use, and which will be 
most likely to damage his children, it is evident that he 
possesses a very sordid nature, or that his character 
has been made sordid by his absorbing pursuit of gain. 
To begin to dispense with one hand what the other 



To Stephen Girard Jones. 159 

has gained, and still may be gaining, is to assume a 
healthy attitude. A man who does this is not spoil- 
ing. 

It happens in this country, where estates are not 
entailed, that there are but a few families which, for 
any considerable number of generations, remain rich. 
Wealth, when left to voluntary management, is almost 
uniformly dissipated in two or three generations, so 
that the great-grandchild nearly always is obliged to 
begin just where the great-grandfather did. Oftener 
than otherwise, the reach of a fortune is briefer than 
this. It is thus that men are not bred to the manage- 
ment and the expenditure of wealth. Our rich men are 
men who have made their money — men who have spent 
their youth in learning how to make it, and spent the 
strength of their years in making it. On becoming 
rich, they find that there is one part of their education 
which has been neglected, viz. : that which relates to 
the best methods of spending money. They are not 
misers ; they are not sordid men ; they would gladly 
do something which shall prove to the world that they 
are not altogether ungrateful for the handsome way in 
which it has treated them. Moreover, there is a call 
within them for repayment in comfort or some form 
of satisfaction for the toil and care which it has cost 
them to win wealth. Many a man on reaching wealth 
has found himself confronted by the great problem of 



160 Letters to the Jonefes. 

his life, and many a man, unable to solve it, has given 
up the thought of spending, and gone back to money- 
getting to seek his sole satisfaction in the excitement 
of the pursuit. 3STot unfrequently the process of getting 
money has been so absorbing, and has so shut out of 
the mind all culture and all generous pleasure, that the 
spending of money can fulfil no want. 

I have said thus much generally on this subject, my 
friend, that you may attach sufficient importance to 
what I have to say to you. You have been fortunate 
in business. Your enterprise and industry have been 
abundantly rewarded. All your adventures have been 
prospered, and you are to-day the richest of all the 
Joneses. What are you going to do with your money ? 
You have arrived at the point when this inquiry has, I 
am sure, profound interest for you. You are not a 
man who can be content with the life-long task of ac- 
quisition. You wish to give an expression to your 
wealth, for your personal satisfaction, and for the pur- 
pose of adding privileges to the lot of those whom you 
love. 

In laying out your plans for spending money, the 
first consideration is safety for yourself and your 
family. Any plan which contemplates idleness or dissi- 
pation for yourself or your children, is illegitimate, 
and will prove to be ruinous. I am not afraid that you 
will ever become idle, or, even, that you will become 



To Stephen Girard Jones. 161 

devoted to any form of vicious indulgence. Your 
habits of industry and sobriety are well formed, and I 
do not think that you are in any personal danger. The 
danger relates entirely to your family. You had a 
hard time when you were a boy, and through all your 
early manhood worked severely. You have frequently 
said to your friends that you did not intend that your 
children should be subjected to as much hardship as 
you had been. There is danger that your parental 
tenderness will injure these children. Permit me to 
ask what harm those early hardships of yours inflicted 
upon you ? Was it not by the means of these hard- 
ships that you learned to achieve your successes ? 
Then why do you so tenderly deprecate hardships for 
your children ? Let me warn you that through this 
tenderness for your children your wealth may become 
— nay, is quite likely to become — a curse to them. 

This notion that wealth brings immunity from in- 
dustry is the ruin of thousands every year. I do not 
intend to convey the idea that your children shall all 
work in the same way that you have done, but that 
neither girl nor boy of yours shall ever receive the im- 
pression that she or he can live reputably or happily 
without the systematic and useful employment of their 
minds, or their hands, or both. Give them all a better 
education than you had, and subject them to the same 
rigid rules of labor and discipline which are applied to 



162 Letters to the Jonefes. 

their poorer classmates. Above all things teach them 
that they must rely upon themselves for their position 
in the world, and that all children are mean-spirited 
and contemptible who base their respectability on the 
wealth of their father. Give all your boys a business, 
and assist them in it sparingly, and with great dis- 
crimination. Let no son of yours " lie down " on you, 
but make all the help you give them depend upon their 
personal worthiness to receive it. Money won without 
effort is little prized, and you may be sure that you 
will get few thanks from your children for releasing 
them from the necessity of industry. Nobody knows 
better than you how necessary industxw is to the com- 
fort and pleasure of living, and it should be your 
special care, in all your schemes for spending money 
upon your family, that these schemes should involve 
family employment or improvement. Better a thousand 
times throw your money into the river, than permit it 
to spoil your children. 

There is danger also to the community in which 
you live, and to the humble men by whom you are 
surrounded, in indiscreet benefactions. You are im- 
pulsive ; your money now comes to you easily ; and it 
is not hard for you to toss a gratuity to those whom 
you know will be glad to receive it. Universal obser- 
vation proves that money which does not cost any- 
thing is rarely well spent. Men will thank you pro- 



To Stephen Girard Jones. 163 

fusely for the dollar which you give them for some 
insignificant service, but that dollar is pretty certain to 
be spent upon their vices, and to help to make them 
beggars and flunkies. You, doubtless, find yourself 
surrounded by men who would " sponge " you gladly 
— who think and say that you could give them any 
amount of money " and never feel it." It is possible 
that there are a few mean-spirited Joneses who are 
already wondering whether you intend to leave them 
any money, or who have already asked you for " assist- 
ance." Never dismiss an application for help without 
examination ; but be careful how you give money to 
those who are able to earn it. Never think it a dis- 
grace to be thought mean and niggardly by those who 
wish to get your money, without rendering an equiva- 
lent for it. 

It is not necessary for me to tell you that no sub- 
scription paper ever starts within five miles of you that 
does not come to you before it completes its round. 
Now do not get sick of the sight of these petitions. 
The offices of charity are never complete, and public 
spirit will always find work to do in fresh measures of 
improvement. It is right that you, who have been so 
abundantly prospered, should be abundantly charitable. 
It is right that you, who have so large a stake in public 
order and general prosperity, should minister gen- 
erously to public improvement. The real danger with 



164 



Letters to the Jonefes. 



you, is, that you will give in such a way as to relieve 
others of the burden of duty which they should carry. 
This, I confess, is not the common weakness of rich 
men, but it would be their common error if the com* 
munity were to have its will, There is a contemptible 
spirit pervading the social body which would gladly 
shirk the cost of supporting public charities and pub- 
lic institutions and public improvements and throw it 
upon rich men. You are the member of a church ; and 
I am ashamed to say that there is quite a general feel- 
ing among the members that you could pay the entire 
expenses " without feeling it." I suppose you might 
do this without suffering very much pecuniary incon- 
venience from it ; but if you were to do it, it would 
damage not only the church but you. The jealousy of 
the very men who would gladly shirk expenses that 
they would load upon your shoulders, would destroy 
the harmony of the church and drive you from it. It 
will sometimes fall to your lot to pay that which nig- 
gardly souls refuse to pay, after the willing ones have 
exhausted their ability. Stand squarely up to this 
work, like the noble man you are. IS'ever let it be seen 
by the community that you have any desire to avoid ex- 
penditures which it belongs to you to make. Do your 
part scrupulously. Let every man see and feel that 
while you will not relieve others of burdens which 
belong to them, you are determined to carry all which 



To Stephen Girard Jones. 165 

belong to you, to the last ounce. Let society feel that 
it can rely upon you at all times for that measure of 
help which it belongs to you to render. 

I am aware that I have told you but little as yet as 
to the proper way of spending money, but I have nar- 
rowed" the field of. inquiry. I have told you never to 
spend it in such a way as to destroy the industrious 
habits of your family or to feed the vices of the poor 
, men around you, or to foster a mendicant spirit among 
your relatives, or to relieve general society from the 
burdens which should be equitably distributed among 
its constituents. And now, let me go further and say 
that all ostentation is vulgar. It is quite the habit of 
men who become rich to show off their wealth by 
building large and costly houses, and furnishing them 
at great expense, and displaying luxurious equipage. 
The men who do this are very rarely those who have 
lived in fine houses, or had practical acquaintance with 
lnxurious domestic appointments ; but this seems to be 
the only way in which they can give expression* to 
their wealth. It is, I admit, better than nothing. 
Streets and building sites are improved by it ; uphol- 
sterers are benefited by it ; various tradesmen are en- 
riched by it ; but, after all, ostentation is vulgar, and, 
moreover, it is not to your liking at all. I know you 
would not enjoy a splendid house ; but you would en- 
joy a better one than you are in now — therefore, build 



166 - Letters to the Jonefes. 

it. You have good common sense and very little taste ; 
therefore with only general directions, pass this busi- 
ness into the hands of the best architect your money 
can secure. Buy good taste, and simply insist on con- 
venience and solidity. Build a house which will be in 
good taste a hundred years hence, so that it may be 
delighted in by your children and your grandchildren. 
It may seem impertinent to tell a man who has been 
shrewd enough to make money that he is not shrewd 
enough to spend it, but unless you have good advice, 
at every step of your progress, in starting an establish- 
ment — that is, in building your house, furnishing it, 
laying out your grounds, &c, &c, — you will be sure 
to excite the ridicule of your friends, and bring morti- 
fication to yourself. It is quite the habit of men who 
have made money to grow self-sufficient, and to sup- 
pose that because they have succeeded so well in one 
department of effort, they are equal to any. A prac- 
ticed eye can tell these men always, by the barren spots 
and the uncultivated and unoccupied spots which their 
management betrays. There will always be something 
to show that the establishment belongs to the man, 
and that the man does not belong to the establishment 
— something to show by its incompleteness the incom- 
pleteness of the owner's education — a library without 
books, a palace without pictures, a garden without 
flowers or fruits, luxury without comfort, or some 



To Stephen Girard Jones. 167 

thing of the sort. You can have such a place as this 
very easily, by simply taking the whole matter into 
your own hands, and assuming that you know all that 
it is necessary to know at starting ; but far better will 
it be for you, and far more for your credit, to assume 
nothing — to assume that you know nothing, and to 
look upon the building and equipment of an establish- 
ment as a course of education. 

I can imagine nothing more delightful or more use- 
ful in family life than the two or three years of study 
and development which attend the proper building of 
a house, and the appointment of the details of a gene- 
rous establishment. If you and your wife and your 
sons and your daughters, beginning with the assump- 
tion that you know nothing of the subject, devote 
yourselves to study and conversation on domestic ar- 
chitecture, and landscape gardening, and furniture and 
books and pictures, seeking for information and sug- 
gestions from every source, you will be surprised and 
delighted to find in the end that you have entered into 
a new life. You will find that you have grown quite 
as rapidly as your house has grown, and that your 
grounds and gardens have been developed no more 
than your mind. You will learn, in short, how to 
spend money upon yourself and yours, in a way which 
ministers to your growth, your industry, and your hap- 
piness. You are the pupils of the artists and scholars 



168 Letters to the Jonefes. 

and artisans whom you employ, studying under the most 
favorable circumstances ; and you will find that an 
education thus pleasantly inaugurated may be pursued 
for life. It may be pursued in books, in society, jn 
travel. 

There is much that I might say on this subject of 
spending money as it relates to other people, in differ- 
ent circumstances, but I am addressing you— a good 
type of " our successful men." You will find that a 
costly table will give you the gout, and your children 
the dyspepsia. Therefore live plainly. You will find 
that luxurious clothing only ministers to the vanity of 
your children ; therefore insist that it shall be simply 
good and chaste and tasteful. You will find that your 
personal necessities are limited, and that, unless you 
permit your wealth to produce a brood of artificial 
wants, you can neither expend your money upon your 
children nor yourself. Have an eye to those around 
you. The greatest kindness you can show to the poor 
is to give them employment, and to pay them for it 
well and promptly. No matter if you do not really 
need their service. If they need your money, make a 
service for them. Above all things, do not give them 
money, unless calamity overtake them, or they become 
unable to labor. I cannot too strongly insist that in 
all your dealings with society, with the poor, and with 
your children, you shall never depreciate in their minds 



To Stephen Girard Jones. 169 

the value of money. Never permit yourself, by your 
way of spending or bestowing money, to convey the 
idea that money has cost you nothing ; for money is 
sacred. It is the price of the labor of mind and body, 
and by some person, at some time, somewhere, was dug 
from the ground, or drawn from the sea. Because you 
have been fortunate in accumulating it, you have no 
right so to spend it as to convey to the public an in- 
correct idea of its cost and true value. 

After all, I imagine that you will find it very diffi- 
cult to spend well that with which Providence has fa- 
vored you, in your home life, and in the ordinary char- 
ities which appeal to you. In closing, will you permit 
me to suggest that there is a class of charities and a 
class of public objects which make special appeal to 
you. The great majority of your fellow-citizens — even 
those who possess what we denominate a competence, 
— have nothing left to pay, after defraying the ex- 
penses of their individual and home life, and contrib- 
uting their portion to the support of society and the 
ordinary charities. For a great hospital, for a literary 
or a religious institution, for a public library, for a 
public gallery of art, they have nothing. These things 
exist through the contributions of such men as you, or 
they do not exist at all. They are costly, and must be 
bought by men of superabundant wealth, You are a 
rational man, my friend, and know that already you 



170 Letters to the Jonefes. 



have more wealth than you and your family can ad- 
vantageously spend. You know, also, that it is always 
best for a man to be his own executor. If you pro- 
pose to do anything for the world, do it now. See to 
the expenditure of your own money, and reap the satis- 
faction of seeing your generation enjoying the fruit of 
your benefactions. This waiting until death to give 
away useless money is the height of folly. The money 
is yours to spend : spend it, and thus multiply the 
sources of your satisfaction. Do not wait until you 
are dead to do a deed from which you have the right 
to draw pleasure. Make what you can out of your 
life, and get what satisfaction you can out of your 
money. There are many chances that it will be wasted 
or misapplied if you leave it to be administered after 
you shall have passed away. 



THE TWELFTH LETTER. 

&0 gfotl f 01US. 

CONCERNING HIS OPINION THAT HE KNO WS PRETTY MUCH 
EVERYTHING. 

I CANNOT tell whether you believe you know as 
much as you pretend to know, or whether you 
assume to know everything as a matter of policy. I 
am simply aware that there is no subject presented to 
you in practical science, in art, in philosophy, in mor- 
als, in religion, in politics, in literature, in society, 
upon which you do not assume to entertain a valuable 
opinion, and that you pretend to be competent to direct 
every affair, and guide and control every interest with 
which you have anything to do. It seems to be a mat- 
ter of principle with you to follow no man's lead, and 
to refuse to admit for a moment that any man's lead 
except your own can be worthy of following. I never 
knew you to ask advice of anybody. It has always 



172 Letters to the Jonefes. 

seemed as if you regard such a measure as an exhibi- 
tion of weakness — one which would compromise your 
position, and bring you to personal disgrace. No : 
you are authority on all subjects, an expert in all arts, 
an adept in all affairs ; and I do not know of a position 
for whose duties you would admit yourself to be in- 
competent, from that of a milliner to that of a minister. 
In all my dealings with the world I have noticed 
that the wisest men make the smallest pretensions. 
The prominent characteristic of all really great men is 
teachableness — readiness to learn of everybody, respect 
for the opinions of others, and modesty touching their 
own attainments. Sir Isaac Newton was so far from 
being a vain or pretentious man that he had the hum- 
blest estimate of his own knowledge. Baron Hum- 
boldt was as simple and unpretending as a child. 
There are men among the living in this country — the 
mention of whose names is not necessary to call up 
their faces — whose exceeding simplicity is only equalled 
by their exceeding wisdom. My friend, a pretentious 
man is, by token of his pretentiousness, a charlatan, al- 
ways. A man needs only to be wise to have learned 
that no man in the world monopolizes its wisdom, and 
that there is no man living who cannot teach him 
something. Human faculty and human life are hardly 
sufficient for learning one thing thoroughly. Each 
man pursues his specialty, learning something of it 



To Noel Jones. 173 

while he lives ; and though he may gather much in 
general touching the specialties of others, he gets little 
Knowledge of detail out of his own walk. 

You ought to have seen enough of the world to 
know that it is full of larger men than you are, or can 
ever hope to be. You ought to know enough of these 
men, by this time, to understand that no pretension of 
yours can raise you to their altitude, or bring you into 
communion with them. The true position for you, and 
for me, and for everybody — wise or simple — is that 
of a learner. Many years ago, as a young physician 
was standing by the bedside of a sick little child in 
the dirty hovel of one who was very poor, he was 
asked by a coarse-looking Irish woman who had come 
in to do a neighborly office, and was standing at the 
opposite side of the bed, whether he thought the pa- 
tient that lay gasping between them would live. He 
replied that he did not think he could live until the 
next morning. There was a shrewd twinkle in her 
black eyes and a positive tone in her voice as she ex- 
pressed an opposite opinion, and, at the same time, 
gave her reasons for it. He went away, and thought 
about it ; and the more he thought the more he became 
convinced that this ignorant Irish woman had been a 
better student of disease than he had, and that her 
observation of previous cases must, have been both in- 
timate and extensive. He gave to her reasons their 



174 Letters to the Jonefes. 

scientific significance, and before he reached his office 
he had become prepared to meet what he had supposed 
to be a dying patient a convalescent the next morning. 
He did find the patient a convalescent, and left him, at 
last, with a valuable addition to his knowledge of 
symptoms, beyond what books and his own observa- 
tion had ever taught him. He learned a second lesson 
by this incident quite as valuable to him, personally, as 
the first. It was, never to regard as valueless the 
opinions of the ignorant when they were based on 
observation, until he had given them a fair and thor- 
ough investigation. 

This ignorant woman had a right to her opinion. 
She had earned it, for she had studied. She may have 
known nothing else particularly worth knowing, but 
this golden bit of wisdom she had won, and the pro- 
fessors and teachers of medicine everywhere would 
have honored themselves by humbly learning it of her. 
Every great and wise brain that lives bows to and 
honors the humblest hand that brings it food and in- 
spiration ; but the position which you assume is an 
insult to all the humble life — not to say high life — by 
which you are surrounded. There are one or two 
things — perhaps half a dozen — which you know better 
than others. Upon these, men come to you for infor- 
mation ; but they know that of all others about which 
you pretend to know so much you really know nothing. 



To Noel Jones. 175 

Let your neighbors estimate you. They recognize you 
as their superior in one or two points, only. Be thank- 
ful that there are one or two things which you really 
know, and which you can offer in exchange for the 
world of knowledge which the multitudinous life 
around you has found and proved. You have your 
specialties, and other men have theirs ; and they know, 
and you ought to know and practically to acknowl- 
edge, that every man you meet has just as much advan- 
tage over you as you have over him. It is the habit 
to speak sneeringly of the poverty of human knowl- 
edge, but human knowledge is not poor in the aggre- 
gate. It is the individual man that knows so little ; 
mankind knows much. Every secret of the earth and 
the air and every treasure of human experience is in 
some man's keeping. If every man could bring to a 
common depository his special discovery, and the re- 
sults of his particular thinking and working, and there 
were a mind large enough to comprehend and syste- 
matize the mass, with a life sufficiently long for the 
enterprise, it would be found that human knowledge is 
as great as humanity itself. Those little books of wis- 
dom contained in the minds of your humble neighbors, 
my friend, are open to you, and you owe it to yourself 
and them to read them with reverence. 

I have said that the prominent characteristic of all 
really great and wise men is teachableness. I may add 



L_. 



176 Letters to the Jonefes. 

to this that without teachableness there can be no true 
greatness, for greatness consists, not in great powers 
{done, and not in genius alone, but in the power to 
appropriate, and in the deed of appropriating, the wis- 
dom made ready for it by other minds. For a great 
man, a thousand minds are thinking, a thousand hands 
are working, a thousand lives are living ; and the 
results of all this thinking and working and living 
come to him and pass into his life, contributing to his 
growth and feeding his power. The canal that crosses 
an empire, and feeds the roots of a score of springing 
cities, and gives passage to the bread of a continent, 
and swells the revenues of a state, his its unseen and 
unacknowledged feeders, that collect its waters among 
the mountains, and pour them into its trailing volume, 
and keep it always full. A great man lays every mind 
with which he comes into contact under tribute. Great 
listeners are such men — absorbent of every drop of 
common sense and even the faintest spray of human 
experience. Unerring ears have they, to distinguish 
between the true and the false in the coins that are 
tossed upon their counter. Finding a man who has 
successfully pursued some specialty in knowledge or 
art, they suck his mind as they would suck an orange, 
throwing away cells and seeds, and drinking the juice 
for nutriment and refreshment. Do you not see, my 
friend, that it is not the policy of such men as these to 



To Noel Jones. 177 

be pretentious ? They could not afford it, even were 
they disposed to be. 

The man who takes your position must necessarily 
go through life at a disadvantage. Your policy drives 
men from you. Pretentiousness is always and every- 
where an insult to society. You repel the knowledge 
that naturally flows to one who pretends to nothing. 
Nobody goes to you with a suggestion, because your 
attitude repels suggestions. You assume to possess all 
the knowledge that you need. All that you learn out- 
side of the specialty which absorbs the most of your 
active power, you are obliged to learn by book, or by 
some trick of indirection. You think that you can 
only appear to be wise by assuming to be wise ; and it 
is possible that you are right. It is possible that you 
impose upon a few who would otherwise hold you for 
a very common sort of person ; but all the reputation 
for wisdom you may secure, can never compensate for 
what you lose by cutting off these voluntary supplies. 
Water flows naturally into the humble, open spaces ; it 
never seeks the mountains, except to run around them. 
Self-love, self-conceit, pride of opinion — all these are 
barriers to knowledge and barriers to success. During 
your brief life, you have suffered from many grave 
mistakes, which, had you been a teachable man, might 
easily have been avoided. Your position repelled all 
information voluntarily offered, and your pride forbade 
8* 



178 Letters to the Jonefes. 

you to seek for it at the only available sources. You 
have blundered through experiments whose results 
could have been given you by a dozen of your neigh- 
bors, who took a secret satisfaction in witnessing 
your expensive failures. He is the wise man only who, 
holding himself unselfishly tributary to the lives of 
others, lays hold of, and appropriates, the wisdom won 
by the life around him. It should be in life as it is in 
science. If I read the record of a series of experi- 
ments by which a certain scientific result is arrived at, 
I do not feel myself humbled by the discovery, nor 
humbled by using the discovery for my own advantage. 
I contribute freely to my own work — I appropriate 
freely the results of the work of others, as a member 
of the great commonwealth of life. It is a noble thing 
to teach ; it is a blessed thing to learn. 

I have told you that there are probably one or two 
things about which you know more than others, and 
touching which your opinions are more valuable than 
those of others. These things your talents have given 
you special power to learn ; and circumstances have 
conspired to give you sufficient opportunity. There 
are ten thousand things on which you assume to have 
an opinion which you never can have a valuable opin- 
ion upon. You have not those peculiar gifts which 
will enable you to acquire experimental knowledge of 
them. You pretend to know something of finance, for 



To Noel Jones. 179 

instance, but it is not in you to comprehend finance. 
No matter how much you may run against the busi- 
ness world — -the whole of your financial wisdom will 
consist of familiarity with common business forms, and 
the grasp of the general fact that if a man spends mor 
than he earns he loses money, while if he earns more 
than he spends, he is making it. You pretend to pos- 
sess a good literary judgment arid taste, but you may 
study from, this time until doomsday and you will 
never, working by yourself, win either. A life of 
study with relation to some arts will not win for you 
what the instincts of some men will teach them in a 
moment. You have your special knowledge. Talent 
and opportunity have given it to you. There is an in- 
definitely large range of life in which you can never 
discover anything that will be of the slightest value to 
you or to others. There is an indefinitely large range 
of life through which you must be led by other minds, 
or you will never explore them at all. The bird-fancier 
with whom I walk in the fields is a humble person. I 
may talk of literature, or art, or science, or politics, 
and he will show no sign of interest or intelligence ; 
but if I talk of birds he becomes my teacher — nay, for 
the time, a king. The air around him is full of crea- 
tures whose habits and characteristics he knows. He 
can pour out to me a tide of beautiful knowledge, for 
the acquirement of which nature has given him the 



180 Letters to the Jonefes. 

needed eyes and ears and apprehensions. He knows 
the note of every bird, the nest of every bird, the 
plumage of every bird. He has possessed himself of 
their secrets, so that, imitating their language, and 
taking the advantage over them which reason gives 
him, he can entrap them. No uncommon bird, be it 
never so small, can invade his neighborhood without his 
detecting it ; and he marks the retirement of a family 
from the region that they have frequented as if they 
belonged to his own species, and had advertised their 
departure. Now this man's knowledge may be humble, 
but it is genuine ; and it is knowledge which, without 
his help, you could not have acquired. Nay, you never 
would have thought of studying birds any more than 
you would the insects that slide up and down the sun- 
beams before your door. 

Knowledge is a very precious possession, and al- 
ways dignifies its possessor. The theorists of all ages 
have filled the world with words, and the pulpit and 
the library and the school are thronged with words 
that represent more or less of the material and the 
spiritual worlds, but knowledge does not come from 
the pulpit, or the library, or the school. To know a 
thing is to live a thing— is to come into personal con- 
tact and acquaintance with a thing through the use of 
powers adapted to win acquaintance by contact. I 
haVe seen grave doctors and literary men and clergy- 



To Noel Jones. 181 

men and shrewd business men listen for hours to 
the talk of a man who knew nothing but the habits 
of a horse, and the means of making that animal the 
kind and healthy servant of man ; and although he 
could not construct a sentence of English elegantly, 
they listened as intently as if he were reciting the 
choicest poem in the language with the unction of a 
Kemble, forgetful alike of his provincial pronuncia- 
tion and his incorrect English, These men were learn- 
ers. They had found a man who knew something. 
He had been studying the horse all his life for them — 
studying the horse in the stable ; and they were drink- 
ing in that which they felt to be positive knowledge. 
It was worth more than all the books on that subject 
they had ever read, and worth more than all their ob- 
servation, because they had not the proper powers for 
studying the horse by contact. It is thus that every 
man is studying something for every other man — gain- 
ing absolute knowledge by contact with special depart- 
ments of material existence, or by demonstrating spirit- 
ual truth in personal experience. 

If you really imagine that you know so much that 
you do not need to seek advice or ask for knowledge at 
the hand of even the humblest man with whom you 
are thrown into relation, you must change your opin- 
ion and your policy. You really know but very little, 
and you cannot obtain any great addition to your posi- 



182 Letters to the Jonefes. 



tive knowledge without laying those under tribute 
whose knowledge has been won as yours has been 
won. Or if you imagine that you have powers adapted 
to discovery and demonstration in all the varied fields 
of knowledge, you must relieve yourself of that mis- 
take. You have not even the powers necessary to 
make a bird-catcher or a horse-tamer. It is not in you 
to be either ; and when you fancy that you could be 
a speaker of Congress, or a writer for the press, or a 
preacher, or a secretary of the treasury, if you only 
had the opportunity for the development or the trial 
of your powers, you are simply permitting your self- 
conceit to befool you. You thirst for all the honors, 
and would be king. Be content with your specialty, 
and bear me witness that even the bird-fancier and the 
horse-tamer have dignity and honor which you have 
hardly won in the higher field in which Providence has 
placed you, and to which your powers are specially 
adapted. Conquer your specialty, and take gratefully 
from other hands the knowledge and wisdom which 
you have neither the time nor the power to acquire. 

You do not know, I suppose, that your assumption 
makes all who are around you uncomfortable. You do 
not give them their places. You permit to them no 
prerogatives and no specialties. The very mother who 
bore you is not permitted to select her own dress, and 
the wife that endures you has her milliner and mantua- 



To Noel Jones. 183 

maker prescribed to her. Yon are presumptuous 
enough to believe that you know how to dress a 
woman. Such presumption stuns me. I tremble when 
I think how some women — gentle, albeit, as lambs, in 
the enjoyment of money and liberty — would spurn the 
dictation of " the humble person who writes these 
lines," if such dictation should invade the sanctities of 
their wardrobe. Oh, Noel Jones ! You and I know 
nothing about these things. Our opinion is not good 
for anything on these subjects. I never bought but 
one silk on my own responsibility, and the shout of 
derision with which it was greeted by one inconsiderate 
member of the family, and the mingled pity and con- 
tempt expressed by the silence of the remainder, have 
remained so terribly fresh in my memory that I have 
never since presumed to take such a liberty. I meekly 
carried it back, and begged the smirking clerk to take 
it again, promising to trade it out in some other 
way. And the women were right, as they usually are. 
What did I know about a woman's dress ? What did 
I know about colors that were " trying to the com- 
plexion," and colors that harmonized with each other, 
and colors and fabrics that harmonized with certain 
ages and seasons, and colors and fabrics that harmo- 
nized with other colors and fabrics that for economical 
reasons were to be worn with them ? Nothing ; yet 
it is my private opinion that I knew as much as you 



184 Letters to the Jonefes. 

do. The truth is that the amount of instinct contained 
in a woman's little finger is worth more as a guide in 
all matters pertaining to the female dress than your 
wisdom and mine combined. Suppose the women 
should undertake to dictate trousers to us ! I would 
not wear a garment thus selected, on principle ; but 
you — I think such an evidence of presumption on the 
part of a woman would kill you outright. 

No, Mr. Noel Jones, you do not know pretty much 
everything. Indeed, you know but a very few things 
thoroughly, and you would now know a great deal more 
than you do if you had never pretended to know any- 
thing. All sensible people measure you. They give 
you credit for being an ordinarily acute and wise man 
— the greatest drawback on your reputation being 
your assumption of knowledge that you do not possess, 
while the only bar to your popularity resides in your 
unwillingness to give to men and women the place and 
consideration to which their specialties of talent and 
knowledge entitle them. 



THE THIRTEENTH LETTER. 

€a $ufas tymtz $oms, fabger. 

CONCERNING T&E DUTIES AND DANGERS OF HIS PRO- 
FESSION. 

YOU have recently commenced the practice of a 
profession of which I possess no intimate knowl- 
edge. I know, generally, that it is a respectable pro- 
fession, which requires in those who successfully pur- 
sue it the best style of intellectual power, thorough 
industry, and a vast amount of special learning. I 
know that it is a profession which, in times of peace, 
attracts to itself the most ambitious young men, be- 
cause it affords the best opportunities for rising to 
positions of influence and power. I know also, that, 
while it is prostituted to the basest uses — as any pro- 
fession may be — it fulfils a want in the establishment 
of justice between man and man, and occupies a legiti- 
mate and an important place in society. I can very 



186 Letters to the Jonefes. 

honestly congratulate you on your connection with 
this profession, and your prospects in it. Will you 
read what an outsider has to say of its dangers and 
duties ? 

The principal — perhaps the only — dangers which 
lie in your way relate to your personal character. I 
regard you as a Christian young man, and I find you 
in a profession which necessarily brings you into con- 
tact with the meanest and the vilest elements in the 
community. Almost every day of your life you find 
yourseif in communication with men whose motives are 
vile and whose characters are base. You are obliged 
to associate with them. You not unfrequently find 
your interest and sympathies engaged in their behalf. 
Almost the whole education of the court-room — to say 
nothing of the onice — is an education in the ways of 
sin. It is there that murder and robbery and adultery 
and swindling and cruelty and all the forms of crime 
and vice are exposed, to their minutest details, and as 
a lawyer, you are necessarily absorbed by these de- 
tails. There is not a form of vice with which you are 
not bound to become familiar. All the meannesses 
and all the rottennesses of human nature and human 
character, and all the modes of their exhibition, must 
come into contact with you, and leave their mark. 
How this can be done without the blunting of your 
sensibilities I do not know. How this, can be done 



To Rufus Choate Jones. 187 

without damaging, if not destroying, your moral sense, 
is beyond my comprehension. I have heard very good 
lawyers talk about the most shocking cases in a shock- 
ingly professional way, and witnessed their amusement 
with the details of some beastly case that had found 
its way into the court-room. I should be sorry to think 
that you could ever acquire such moral indifference, yet 
I know that you may, and believe that you will, if you 
do not guard yourself particularly against it. 

It seems to me quite impossible that a man should 
have a professional interest in the details of a case of 
crime without losing something of the moral repug- 
nance with which the case would naturally inspire him. 
I suppose that this loss of moral sensibility may not 
necessarily be accompanied by actual depravity, yet it 
is, nevertheless, an evil, for it destroys one of the bar- 
riers to depravity. Any influence which familiarizes 
the mind with sin and crime to such an extent that sin 
and crime cease to fill the soul with horror or disgust, 
is much to be deprecated. If you had a young son or 
a young daughter, you would regard any event which 
would bring their minds into familiarity with crime as 
a calamity. It would probably be a greater calamity 
to them than to you, but why it should be different in 
kind, I cannot tell. I think you have only to look 
around you, among your own profession, to find men 
who have received incurable damage through their 



188 Letters to the Jonefes. 

professional intimacy with sin. You know numbers 
of lawyers who take an interest which is anything but 
professional in the details of a case of shame that ought 
to fill them with an abhorrence so deep that they 
would gladly fly from it. 

Again, constant familiarity with the weak and the 
erring side of human nature destroys respect for human 
nature itself. The more you learn of the members of 
the legal profession, the more you will learn that great 
numbers of them have ceased to respect human nature. 
This seems to me to be one of the greatest calamities 
that can befal any man. I do not wonder at this effect 
at all. There is no class of people in the world that 
see so great cause to hold human nature in contempt 
as the legal. They come into contact with men whom 
the world calls honorable and good, and find in them 
such traits of meanness, and such hypocrisy and dis- 
honor, and such readiness to be crippled under tempta- 
tion, and such untruthfulness under the pressure of 
selfish interest, that they naturally enough conclude 
that one man is about as bad as another, and that no 
man is to be relied upon where his appetites or his 
selfish interests are concerned. I say that I do not 
wonder at this, but it is much to be deprecated ; and 
I know of no way to avoid it, except by free associa- 
tion with good men and innocent women and children. 
When a man has lost his respect for human nature, ho 



To Rufus Choate Jones. 189 

has lost, necessarily, his respect for himself, for, 
whether he wills it or not, he goes with his kind. 

But there is another danger still which will assail 
you — more subtle and more damaging than profes- 
sional interest in crime or professional intimacy with 
the worst side of human nature, and this is professional 
interest in criminals themselves. I am sorry to say it, 
but you will find yourself the professional defender of 
men whom you know to be the foes of society — of 
thieves, pickpockets, gamblers, murderers, seducers, 
swindlers. You will find yourself either lying or 
tempted to lie in order to shield from justice men 
who you know ought to be punished. You will find 
yourself arrayed against law and order, against the 
peace of the commonwealth, against the purity of so- 
ciety, against morals and religion, in the defense of a 
man whom you know to be guilty of the crime charged 
against him, and deserving of the punishment attached 
to* it by the laws of the land. I say " you," because 
I suppose you will naturally follow in the track of the 
principal members of your profession. Every criminal 
is defended to the uttermost by men who are zealous 
in their attempt to prove him innocent, and to shield 
him from punishment. Great professional reputations 
are sometimes acquired by saving from the gallows a 
man who everybody is morally certain ought to be 
hung. A triumph of crime like this is quoted ad- 



190 Letters to the Jonefes. 

miringly by the profession, and regarded with com- 
placent triumph by the professional victor. I have 
heard men talk by the hour to prove that to be true 
which they and everybody else knew, in all moral cer- 
tainty, to be false, and to demonstrate the innocence 
of a man whom they knew to be guilty. Indeed, this 
mode of proceeding has become a part of the ma- 
chinery of the law, and is recognized as entirely legiti- 
mate. "We hear, occasionally, of cases so bad that the 
counsel engaged in the defence throw them up in dis- 
gust ; but these are very rare, and I doubt whether 
such a surrender is regarded as a fair thing by the 
profession. 

Now I ask you, before professional usage has had 
time to warp your common sense, what must be the 
effect upon the mind of an advocate, of throwing the 
entire sum of his personal power — all his logic, all his 
learning, all his sympathies and desires, all his interests 
and all his earnestness — into the defence of a man 
who he has good reason to believe is a foe to law 
and order, and justly deserving of punishment for a 
breach of both ? What must be the effect of identify- 
ing his own personal and professional reputation with 
the success of a criminal, in his attempt to shield him- 
self from justice ? What must be the effect upon his 
mind of a triumph over the law for himself and for 
him who has trampled it under his feet ? I know that 



To Rufus Choate Jones. 191 

there is a specious style of argument in use in your 
profession which takes the decision of a case out of the 
hands of a criminal's professional defender, and gives 
it to the jury before which he is to be tried. The 
lawyers will say that an advocate has no right to decide 
on the guilt of a man on trial — that his work is to 
defend; and that twelve men, whose business under 
the law it is, will make the decision. This is strictly 
professional talk — the talk of men who make a dis- 
tinction between law and justice — the talk of men who 
stand by that which is simply legal, and let justice and 
right take care of themselves. These men would tell 
you that if you were engaged in the defence of a per- 
son who you were morally certain was guilty of the 
crime charged upon him, you would not be excusable 
did you not do what you could to save him, by a resort 
to every legal trick and quibble of which you might be 
the master. This is precisely what they do. They 
personally rejoice in the defeat of justice. Whenever 
justice is defeated, and right denied or destroyed, in 
" a court of justice," there is always present one lawyer 
to rejoice personally over the fact — a lawyer whose 
sympathies and success are identified with the triumph 
of the wrong-doer. 

I remember, when a lad, of witnessing an interview 
between a couple of eminent lawyers, — each of whom 
has come to great personal and political honor sincfl 



192 Letters to the Jonefes. 

then, — which to my unsophisticated moral sense, was 
quite shocking. One had been attending a term of 
court in an adjoining county, for the management of 
an important case in which both were interested. The 
returning lawyer greeted his associate with a triumphant 
nourish of his riding stick, and exclaimed — " "We've 
beaten them ! we've beaten them ! " Thereupon they 
gleefully talked the matter over. It seemed very 
strange to me that they could rejoice at having "beaten 
them," without the slightest reference to the matter 
of justice and of right. If the man had been engaged 
in a personal fight or a horse race, and had come off the 
winner, he would have expressed his triumph in the 
same way, and with just as little reference to the moral 
aspects and relations of the case. This was a profes- 
sional triumph, and it did not matter, apparently, 
whether justice had shared the victory with him, or 
had been vanquished with his opponents in the suit. 
This professional indifference to justice and to right, 
acquired by the identification of your own personal 
success with the safety and success of those whom you 
know or believe to be criminals, is what I warn you 
against. I tell you that this cannot be indulged in 
without injury to you, and were it not an ungrateful 
and offensive task, I could refer you to illustrious in- 
stances of legal depravity, induced by earnest defence 
of the wrong. I could point you to eminent lawyers. 



To Rufus Choate Jones. 193 

with whom lying is as easy as breathing — men who do 
not scruple to misrepresent, misconstrue, prevaricate, 
cheat, resort to all mean and unworthy subterfuges, 
suppress, make use of all available means to carry a 
point against law and good society and pure morals, in 
favor of ruffians who deserve nothing better than the 
halter or the prison. A lawyer has only to do this 
thing to a sufficient extent with sufficient earnestness, 
to lose both his sense of, and respect for, the right, and 
to become morally worthless. 

I suppose that you will tell me that I am a dreamer, 
and that I am suggesting something that is entirely 
impracticable, when I advise you never to permit your- 
self to be professionally arrayed against justice. Tour 
seniors in the profession will smile contemptuously at 
my suggestion, I know, and I will not blame them, for 
I know how fatally they have been warped by their 
practice. I take the broad ground that no man, what- 
ever may be his profession, has a moral right to defeat, 
or to ntrive by all the means at his command, to defeat 
the er ds of justice in the community in Avhich he lives, 
and that no man can consciously identify himself with 
the wrong, and fight earnestly for its triumph, without 
inflicting incalculable damage upon his own moral sense 
and moral character. I do not believe that you— a 
professional man — have a moral right to do in a oourt 
of justice what I— not a professional man — have no 



194 Letters to the Jonefes. 

moral right to do. I do not believe that you have a 
moral right to stand up before a jury, and try to mis- 
lead it by tricks of language, by quibbles of law, by 
springing of false issues, by engaging their sympathies 
at the expense of their reason, and I know it is a moral 
impossibility for you to do it without damage to your- 
self. Mark my words : I do not advise you to leave a 
client while you have a reasonable doubt of his guilt, 
or a case where you have a reasonable doubt of its in- 
justice ; but I say without hesitation that when you 
become convinced that you can go no further in the 
professional advocacy of a man or a cause, without 
arraying yourself against right, against justice, against 
the well being of society, you are bound, in duty to 
God, the state, and yourself, to abandon that man or 
cause ; and all the professional sophistry which you 
and your professional brethren can muster can never 
convince me to the contrary. 

The fact that the money or thieves and scoundrels 
will buy the best legal service to be had is notorious, 
and it is but a short time ago that it appeared in evi- 
dence, in a court of justice, that a certain crime was 
committed by a man who, calculating his chances for 
detection, relied upon a certain lawyer to " get him off." 
Was that lawyer practically a friend or a foe to society ? 
Had he a right professionally, or in any way, so to con- 
duct himself as to encourage the commission of crime ? 



To Rufus Choate Jones. 195 

But I leave this point for one closely related to it. 
The whole tendency of your profession, as it seems to 
me, is the substitution of a human for a divine rule of 
action. I think that a lawyer naturally comes to view 
every action and every man from a legal stand-point 
All your practical dealing with men is on a legal basis. 
If there be a hole in the law, large enough to let 
through your criminal client, you will pull him through. 
A flaw in an indictment will spoil a case legally, while 
morally and rationally it is not touched at all. You 
feel justified in doing anything that is legal, to favor 
your client, or your cause. Your conscience has come 
to identify that which is legal with that which is right. 
The law of the Lord is perfect ; the law of man is im- 
perfect ; and your constant association with the la-tter, 
naturally crowds the other out of sight. You measure 
the actions of men by that prescriptive red tape of 
yours, and the standard of right within your own soul 
is degraded. 

Litigation is one of the evils of the world, and is 
voluntarily pursued more to secure personal will than 
sound justice. There are many cases of doubt in which 
a suit at law is entirelygustifiable, not to say desirable ; 
but you are already old enough to know that two- 
thirds of the civil cases tried would never find their 
way into court if simple justice were all that the liti- 
gants were after. Selfish interest, personal greed, 



196 Letters to the Jonefes. 

pride of purpose, wilfulness and waywardness — these 
are the elements of litigation everywhere. "Now it is 
the misfortune of your profession that its revenue is 
very largely dependent upon the selfishness and stub- 
bornness of men. It is apparently for the personal 
interest of every lawyer to foster a litigious spirit in 
the community, and to nurse every cause of difference 
between men. That this is done by the more disrep- 
utable of your profession, I presume you will admit ; 
and I am sure that you will not deny that the better 
class of lawyers do not discourage litigation as much 
as they might. My friend, here is a duty which I 
exhort you not to avoid. If you can prevent a lawsuit 
between citizens, in which no important end of justice 
is involved, or settle a difference which is more a ques- 
tion of personal will than of right, then, as a Christian 
man, and a good citizen, you are bound to interfere at 
whatever personal sacrifice. If I were to foster a legal 
quarrel between neighbors, which my advice would 
prevent, you would call me a bad neighbor and a bad 
citizen. The fact that it is for your professional in- 
terest that-neighbors quarrel does not relieve you from 
the same opprobrium, for the same mean office. There 
is no man in the world so well situated for promoting 
the ends of peace between citizens as the lawyer, and 
if he do not avail himself of his opportunities, then he 
fails in the offices of good citizenship. 



To Rufus Choate Jones. 197 

I hesitate to speak of one of the dangers to which 
you are exposed, because it supposes that you can cease 
to be a gentleman ; but you will find that, in the court- 
room, lawyers not unfrequently indulge in practices 
which, while they may be strictly legal, are not gentle- 
manly. I declare to you that I have witnessed more 
cowardly insolence in a court-room than in any other 
place that pretended to be controlled by the laws of 
decency. I have seen men whose years and positions 
should have given them dignity, brow-beat and badger 
and, in every way sufferable by a too indulgent court, 
abuse old, simple-hearted men and honest women, 
whose crime it was to be summoned as unwilling wit- 
nesses by the party opposing them. I am not familiar 
with bar-rooms or brothels, but I think it would be 
hard to find in any of them such flagrant instances of 
ill-breeding as are witnessed at every term of court in 
every court-room in the land. I do not care how high 
the lawyer stands who takes advantage of his position 
to abuse the honest witnesses which the law places in 
his hands for examination : — he is no gentleman. He 
is a mean and cowardly scoundrel. Under the protec- 
tion of the court, he indulges in practices so insulting 
to honest and blamelesss men and women that all there 
is within them of manhood and womanhood rises to 
resent the indignity, yet they are powerless, and the 
unwhipped coward rubs his hands over his clever boor- 



198 



Letters to the Jonefes. 



isliriess and brutality. For your own sake — nay, for 
decency's sake — be a gentleman in the court-room, and 
do what you can to compel others to be gentlemen. 
This gratuitous abuse of those who are so unfortunate 
as to be summoned as witnesses, by the lawyers into 
whose hands they fall, is the shame and disgrace of 
your profession. 

Rather a formidable array of dangers you will say, 
I imagine ; and perhaps you will add that it is not a 
very promising display of duties. I grant it, but I 
seek the glory of your profession and the good of 
yourself. The profession of the law, when it confines 
itself to the ministry of justice, is one of the noblest 
in which a man can engage. In that aspect, it is 
worthy of the devotion of the best minds which the 
country produces ; but the profession of the law when 
it is used in the prostitution of justice for hire, — when 
it is freely lent, with all the personal resources of him 
who practises it, to aid the notorious criminal to escape 
the punishment due to his crimes, and to thwart the 
adjustment of the right between man and man, is an 
outrageous nuisance. I would have you remain what 
I believe you now are — a Christian lawyer — a man 
who can never forget that the royal right is above the 
legal letter — that God lives, and claims a place in the 
human soul, and that He refuses to live there side by 
side with venal falsehood. I would have you retain, 



To Rufus Choate Jones. 



199 






amid all the temptations of your profession, your love 
of justice and of right, and your hatred of injustice and 
wrong. I would have you guard yourself against con- 
founding that which is right with that which is legal, 
so that the latter shall always seem essentially the 
former. I would have you maintain in all places the 
demeanor of a gentleman. I would have you a good 
citizen and not a promoter of litigation. I would have 
you so pure, and upright, and honorable, and peace- 
loving, that men shall refer their differences to you 
rather than carry them into court. I do not wish to 
appeal to any selfish motives, but my opinion is that 
such a lawyer as I desire you to be, would command a 
premium in all the markets of the world. 



THE FOURTEENTH LETTER. 

£0 Pre. gosal fnrple f oms, 

CONCERNING II EB ABSORBING DEVOTION TO HEB OWN 
PERSON. 

I HAVE a great respect for the human body. As 
a piece of vitalized mechanism it is the most ad- 
mirable thing in the world. As the dwelling-place and 
associate and minister of the human soul — the possess- 
or of those exquisite senses through which that soul 
feeds and breathes and receives knowledge and inspira- 
tion — its first home — the vestibule of its immortality 
— I give it honor. It is a thing of dignity — a sacred 
thing — sacred to its possessor, and sacred to those to 
whom in sacred love it may be given. Whenever the 
soul rises to a true appreciation of its own worth, it 
pays honor to the body which bears it. Barbarism 
wanders in negligent nakedness, but civilization, of 
whatever type, honors the body — covers it from sight 



To Mrs. Royal Purple Jones. 201 



— drapes and protects it with reference to ideas of 
comfort and taste. Innocence, like that possessed by 
infancy, may feel no shame without drapery, but vir- 
tue, a very different thing, grows crimson when un- 
covered. 

The human body is a thing of beauty as well as of 
dignity. All civilized nations have recognized this 
fact, and all have striven, more or less effectually, to 
reveal or enhance that beauty by dress. It costs 
almost as much to clothe civilization as it does to feed 
it ; and human ingenuity is taxed to its utmost, and all 
departments of, nature are laid under tribute, to pro- 
duce the fabrics witn which civilization enrobes itself. 

This domain of dress is one which Fashion has con- 
quered and made peculiarly her own, and it ought to 
be a matter of interest to you, madam, as I doubt not 
it will be to people generally, to note how far that 
power has sophisticated the idea of personal dignity on 
which dress is based. Up to a certain point of beauty 
of fabric and elaborateness of ornamentation, dress 
can be carried legitimately, and with no violence to 
personal dignity ; but beyond that point, there must 
always come a resort to the barbaric idea, which must 
necessarily bring personal degradation. Barbarism, 
without any thought of personal dignity — of bodily 
sacredness — has gratified its vanity and desire for dis- 
tinction by means of marks and gaudy ornaments. It 

9* 



202 Letters to the Jonefes. 

has tattooed its skin, hung rings in its nose, worn beads 
on its neck— at its girdle — at its knees, stuck feathers 
in its hair, and daubed paint upon its face. This kind - 
of ornamentation — an exhibition of personal vanity — 
is the highest expression of the highest idea which 
barbarism has ever entertained concerning the human 
body. This vanity touching the person, that feels 
gratification in ornaments and trappings, has not the 
slightest natural connection with that better idea which 
finds in graceful drapery the refuge and- shield of the 
dignity belonging to the living tenement of the living 
soul. You will see, therefore, that whenever fashion 
carries dress to extremes, or beyond the point of giving 
the body a graceful and becoming covering, it always 
resorts to barbarism to help it out — to partial naked- 
ness, or to jewels and precious stones and trinkets and 
ribbons and laces and all possible sorts of ornaments. 
The fashionable belle of Newport and Saratoga enters 
the assembly room or the dining hall only to show that 
she is sister of the South Sea Islander, and that the 
same idea controls them both. 

The curse of Eden seems to have been the subjec- 
tion of the soul to the service of the body. When I 
reflect upon the relative dignity and importance of the 
soul and the body — the immortality of the one and the 
mortality of the other, the heavenly alliances of the one 
and the earthly alliances of the other, the Godlike ca- 



To Mrs. Royal Purple Jones. 



203 



pacities of the one and the brutal appetites of the 
other — it astonishes me to realize that the soul's work 
in this world is, in the majority of cases, simply that 
of procuring food and raiment and shelter for the 
body. It astonishes me to realize that under every 
form of civilization the body is the soul's tyrant and 
leads it by the nose. Naturally, the body is upper- 
most m the general thought. Men must have food 
and clothing and shelter, or die ; they must win all 
these for their children, or lose them. So, Under the 
circumstances of our life, and the usages of our civili- 
zation, the body is necessarily a constant topic of 
thought. It is not strange, therefore, that the soul 
often forgets that it is master, and loses sight of its 
own dignity and destiny in its habitual devotion to 
the satisfaction of bodily want. 

But this, Mrs. Royal Purple Jones, is not your 
trouble. You are not obliged to work for a living. 
Your money has been earned for you by other hands, 
and your devotion to your body is voluntary and not 
comuuisory. Your soul, with all its fine capacities, 
and its possibilities of culture and of goodness, is the 
willing and devoted slave of the body in which it 
lives. Your person is the central motive of your life. 
Now that I call your attention to the fact, will you tell 
me, or attempt to realize to yourself, how much 
thought and how much time you devote to the hair 



204 Letters to the Jonefes. 

that adorns your head ? How much of both do you 
give to the little matter of eye-brows ? — how much to 
your teeth ? — how much to your face as a whole, 
with all the considerations of cuticular texture and 
complexion ? — how much to your hands ? — how much 
to your arms ? — how much to your neck ? — how much 
to your feet ? — how much to your general configura- 
tion ? Madam, you are in love with your own body, 
and the keenest delight of your whole life consists in 
having that body admired and praised. The sense of 
personal modesty and dignity which flies to dress for 
refuge has really no place in you. I do not mean that 
you are an immodest woman, but that this sense of 
personal sacredness has been overcome by personal 
vanity so far that you dress rather to show than to 
hide your body — to attract attention to your person 
than to make it the modest and inconspicuous tene- 
ment of your soul. What is it that most absorbs your 
time ? What is it that most absorbs your money ? 
Is it not dress ? Think of the silks that you buy, and 
the study that you bestow upon their selection and 
manufacture into garments ! Think of the hats and 
the gloves and the jewelry, and of the intense and ab- 
sorbing interest which attend their purchase and first 
wearing! Think of your constant observation and 
criticism of the dress of your friends ! I believe you 
will admit to yourself, if not to me, that I have 



To Mrs. Royal Purple Jones. 205 

found you out — that I know where you have your 
lifts. 

"When you attend a party, what is the highest ob- 
ject you contemplate ? Do you attend for the purpose 
of enjoying the conversation of dear friends, or to min- 
ister to the pleasure of others by your own gifts of 
conversation, or to enjoy the sight of pleasant faces, 
or to hear music, or to engage in dancing, or such 
other amusements as may be indulged in ? Is it for 
all or any of these that you attend ? Is it not rather 
to show your dress, and to display, for the admiration 
of the gentlemen, and the envy of the ladies like your- 
self, your richly draped and elaborately ornamented 
person ? Would you have a single motive to attend 
a party if you were obliged to dress inconspicuously 
and plainly ? Is it not true that your one absorbing 
thought with relation to such attendance concerns the 
dressing and adornment of your person ? And when 
you return from it, do you think of anything except the 
simple questions as to how you looked, and how you 
compared or contrasted with certain other women who 
unfortunately are as much devoted to their persons as 
you are ? When you walk in the streets, what are you 
thinking about ? Are you thinking of what you see 
in the shop- windows, or what the shop-windows see on 
you? Are you not conscious that many eyes are 
turned upon you to see what you take great pains to 



206 Letters to the Jonefes. 

make attractive to all eyes ? "When you dress for 
church, and when you enter the sacred edifice, what 
thought is uppermost in your mind ? Is it a thought 
which becomes the holy place, or is it still of the 
drapery and the ornaments with which you have hung 
your person ? Are you not filled everywhere — under 
all circumstances — with these same vanities ? Do 
they not haunt and hold you constantly ? 

You need not blush and hang your head, because 
you find that I know you better than you have hitherto 
known yourself, for you have plenty of company. The 
whole world of fashionable women is controlled by the 
same thoughts and ideas that control you — a world of 
women who, in the pursuit of personal adornment, 
have adopted the ideas of barbarism, and have per- 
sonally descended toward barbarism through such 
adoption. You, madam, and all of your associates, 
have, in your devotion to the dressing and bedizening 
of your persons, degraded yourselves pitifully. The 
whole number of fashionable female souls are but 
slaves to the fading bodies in which they live. When 
I look in upon a fashionable watering-place, and see 
how dress and personal adornment absolutely monopo- 
lize the time and the thought of the fashionable women 
assembled there — when I witness the rivalry among 
them — the attempts to outshine each other in diamonds 
and all the tributaries to costly, dress — when I see their 



To Mrs. Royal Purple Jones. 207 

jealousies, and hear their ill-natured criticisms of each 
other, and then realize that these women are mothers 
and those of whom mothers will be made, I have 
opened to me a gulf of barbarous selfishness — a scene 
of gilded meanness and misery — from which I shrink 
back heart-sick and disgusted. Good Heaven, madam ! 
what and who are you? Are you all body and no 
soul ? Is it decent business for a decent soul to be 
constantly engaged — absorbingly occupied — in orna- 
menting and showing off for the gratification of per- 
sonal vanity the body it inhabits ? Do you realize how 
low you are fallen? Do you realize that you are 
come to the small and indecent business of getting up 
your person to be looked at, admired, praised, — that 
the most grateful satisfactions of your life are found 
in this business, and that the business itself is but a 
single moral remove from prostitution ? 

If I have succeeded in picturing you to yourself, per- 
haps you will be prepared to follow me into a contem- 
plation of a few of the natural consequences of your in- 
fatuation upon your character and happiness. Will 
you look among your fashionable female acquaintances, 
and find one who is making any intellectual progress? 
The thing is impossible. " There is nothing more con- 
ducive to mental growth and development in devotion 
to the keeping and dressing of the person of a woman, 
than there is in the keeping and the grooming and 



208 Letters to the Jonefes. 

harnessing of a pet horse. Look at a man who devotes 
himself to a horse. He may be a very pleasant fellow, 
and ordinarily intelligent, but if he is enamored of 
his animal, and gives himself up to his care and ex 
hibition, becoming what is known as a " horse man," 
that ends his intellectual development. When horse 
gets highest in any man's mind, culture ceases. Now, 
madam, it would make no difference, practically, 
whether you were devoted to the person of a horse, 
or the person of a pet dog, or the person of Mrs. Royal 
Purple Jones. The mind that engages in no higher 
business, or that finds its highest delight in no higher 
pursuit than that of grooming and displaying a beau- 
tiful body, can make no progress into a nobler life. 
Practically you will find this the case everywhere. 
You will find that your fashionable friends do not 
grow at all. They move along in the same old ruts, 
prate of the same old vanities, go the same old rounds 
of frivolity, and only become less sprightly and agree- 
able as the years pass by. Just what you see in these 
people, madam, I see in you. 

There is another very sad result which comes natu- 
rally from this devotion to your own person. You 
are already grown supremely selfish. You have per- 
mitted your personal vanity to control you so long that 
you can really see nothing in the universe but your- 
self. It seems proper and right that everybody should 



To Mrs. Royal Purple Jones. 209 

serve you. Any labor that would soil or enlarge your 
small white hands — any toil that would tax the powers 
of your petted body — any service for others that would 
draw you away from service to youi own person — is 
shunned. Your mother, your sisters, your friends, are 
all laid under tribute to you, and your petulance under 
denial has made them your slaves. Absorbed by these 
thoughts of yourself, devoted to nothing but yourself, 
making room for no plans which do not relate to your- 
self, you have come to regard yourself as the world's 
pivotal centre. It does not occur to you at all that the 
kind people around you can have any interests or plans 
of their own to look after. All the fish must come to 
your net, or you are unhappy ; and if those around you 
are not made unhappy it is not because you do not try 
to make them so. Sometimes you act like a miserable, 
spoiled baby, and then, under the spur of jealousy, you 
act like an infuriated brute. The tendency to this 
shameful selfishness is natural and irresistible, in all 
who devote themselves, as you have done, to the care 
and exhibition of their persons. Others may cover it 
from sight more than you do, by a more cunning art, 
but it is there. It cannot be otherwise, and I cannot 
conceive of a type of selfishness more nearly perfect 
than that which the character of almost any fashion- 
able woman illustrates. 

There is still another result which naturally flows 



210 Letters to the Joneles. 



from supreme devotion to the person, viz : vulgarity. 
Madam, I look anywhere in God's world for genuine 
refinement and lady-like instincts and manners rather 
than to fashionable society. True refinement and 
gentle manners can never find their home in any so- 
ciety in which selfishness reigns. True refinement has 
brains. True refinement has a heart. True refinement 
always makes room in the world for others. True re- 
finement has consideration for others. True refine- 
ment does not find its satisfactions in the display and 
adornment of the body. True refinement refuses to 
be governed by fashion, having within itself a higher 
and a purer law. True refinement shrinks from con- 
spicuity and show. True refinement engages in no un- 
worthy and unwomanly rivalries. You know that the 
coarsest words you ever hear from the lips of women 
— the harshest, meanest, worst things — the lowest ex- 
pressions — you hear from the lips of those of your 
own set. Yet mark the impudent hypocrisy of the 
thing. You and your set assume to be the leaders of 
society— the ton — the pattern women of the nation — 
bo far refined that all other women are counted vul- 
gar ! My friend, (if you are not by this time become 
my enemy,) how can you help becoming vulgar when 
you have been nothing for years but your own groom ? 
How can you help becoming low when you have 
thought of nothing for years but your own person ? 



To Mrs. Royal Purple Jones. 211 



You are vulgar. All your pursuits are vulgar. Your 
rivals and associates are vulgar, and your ambitions 
are as vulgar as those of the horse-jockey. 

I. would not be misunderstood. I admire a well 
dressed woman. I admire a beautiful woman, and I 
thoroughly approve all legitimate efforts to render the 
person both of man and woman agreeable. Men and 
women owe it to their own dignity to drape their per 
sons becomingly and well, and they can do this with- 
out acquiring an absorbing passion for dress, or giving 
any more than the necessary amount of thought and 
time to it. The fact is that a woman who is what a 
woman should be has no need of elaborate personal 
ornament to make her attractive. A pure, true heart, 
a self-forgetful spirit, an innocent delight in innocent 
society, a wish and an effort to please, ready ministry 
to the wants of others, graceful accomplishments wil- 
lingly used, sprightliness and intelligence, these are 
passports to personal power. Relying upon these, 
there is no woman whose person is simply and becom- 
ingly dressed who is not well dressed. "With any or 
all of these, the person becomes pleasing. 

As I write, there comes to my memory the person 
of a woman whom everybody loved and admired — 
the most thoroughly popular woman I ever knew. 
She was welcomed alike in fashionable and refined so- 
ciety, and behaved herself alike in both. She u r as not 



212 



Letters to the Jonefes. 



beautiful, but she was charming. She never orna- 
mented her person, but she was always well dressed. 
A simple, well-fitted gown, and hair tastefully dis- 
posed, were all one could see of any effort to make her 
person pleasing, and these seemed to be forgotten, and, 
I believe, were forgotten, the moment she entered so- 
ciety. When friends were around her she had no 
thought but of them — no desire but to give and receive 
pleasure. If she was asked to sing she sang, and, if 
it ministered to the pleasure of others, she sang pa- 
tiently, even to weariness. She was as intelligent and 
stimulating in sober conversation as she was playful in 
spirit, and though she loved general society, and min- 
gled freely in it, not a breath of slander ever sullied 
her name, and not an emotion was ever excited by her 
that did not do her honor. Every man admired and 
honored her, and every woman — a much greater mar- 
vel — spoke in her praise. Many a belle, dressed at the 
height of fashion, entered her presence only to become 
insignificant. Diamonds were forgotten and splendid 
dress was unmentioned, while her sweet presence, her 
self-forgetful devotion to the pleasure of others, and 
her gentle manners, were recalled and dwelt upon with 
unalloyed delight. 

Madam, I have been painting from life. I have 
painted you from life, and I have painted this friend 
from life — a friend so modest and so unconscious of her 



To Mrs. Royal Purple Jones. 213 

charms that she would weep with her sense of un worthi- 
ness if she were told that I had attempted to paint her. 
How does the contrast strike you ? Do you not see 
that you are a slave and that she is a free woman ? 
Do you not see that she has entered into the eternal 
realities of things, and that you are engrossed in 
ephemeral nothingnesses ? Do you not see that she is a 
refined woman and that you are a coarse one ? Do 
you not see that her unselfish devotion to the happi- 
ness of others is beautiful, that her unconsciousness of 
her charms is beautiful, that her simplicity is beauti- 
ful, and that yOur selfishness and your devotion to 
dress and your jealousy and your rivalries are all vul- 
gar and ugly and hateful ? 

It is complained of by many of your sex that men 
regard woman as only a plaything — a creature to be 
humored and petted and controlled, and indulged in as 
a troublesome luxury. It is complained of that woman 
does not have her place as man's equal — as his friend, 
companion, and partner. Are men entirely in the 
blame for this opinion, to the limited extent in which 
't, is held ? Suppose men were to take you and such 
as arc like you as the subjects of their study: what 
would be their conclusions ? Suppose they were thor- 
oughly to comprehend your devotion to your own per 
son, — to realize the absolute absorption of all your 
energies and all your time by the frivolous and mean 



214 



Letters to the Jonefes, 



objects that inthrall you — what would be their decis- 
ion ? What does your husband think about it ? Ex- 
cuse me for mentioning him, madam. I am aware that 
he occupies a very small share of your attention, but, 
really, the man who finds you in money has a right to 
an opinion upon this point. You do not care what his 
opinion is ? I thought so. You have ceased to love 
him, and he has ceased to oppose you. It is impossible 
for your husband to love you. It is impossible for any 
man either to love or to honor a woman so selfish as 
you are ; and your sex may blame you and those who 
are like you for all the contempt which a certain class 
of men feel for women. You degrade yourself to 
the position of a showy creature, good for nothing 
but to spend money. You teach men contempt for 
your sex, and it is only the modest and intelligent 
women whom you despise that redeem it to admira- 
tion and love. 



THE FIFTEENTH LETTER. 

&o lllias Jxlicia jpemans fo'iws. 

CONCERNING HER STRONG DESIRE TO BECOME AST 
AUTHORESS. 

WILL you permit me to reply publicly to the pri. 
vate letter in which you have informed me 
of your strong desire to engage in literary labor, as a 
form of self-expression which embraces all your am- 
bition and all your wish to do good ? Had yours been 
the first letter of the kind that had reached my hand, I 
should not have ventured to treat your case publicly ; 
but I have received a hundred such, and many of these 
came to me so reluctantly — after such a struggle with 
inclination — that I am convinced that you are only one 
of a class which numbers its thousands in every part 
of the country. Indeed, the world is full of women 
whose unsatisfied lives and whose overflowing natures 
fill them with suggestions of ideal good, to be won in 



216 Letters to the Joneies. 

some field of art. If these women could use the pencil 
or the chisel, many of them would be artists, or would 
try to be artists ; but the pen is the only instrument 
of expression with which their fingers are familiar, and 
they come to regard it as their only resort. I have a 
deep sympathy with this desire to write, and I am sure 
that you will receive what I have to say to you as the 
words of a friend. 

You have a strong desire to write, you tell me. 
Well, this desire to write may be associated with the 
power to succeed as a writer, or it may not. The de- 
sire to write is not even prima facie evidence of fit- 
ness for writing. This desire, as I have already inti- 
mated to you, is quite universal. One of the strangest 
anomalies of human nature is exhibited in the general 
desire to do those things which are the most difficult 
to do. A little man desires to do the work of a large 
man, and a large man desires to be thought nimble. 
A man of slender limb desires to be an athlete. It is 
very common for men to have a strong desire to sing 
or to play upon a musical instrument who could not 
sing or play with a century's practice, because they 
have neither voice nor ear. I suppose that nine out of 
ten of the students in our colleges have a strong desire 
to be orators, and you know how much, or how little, 
the desire amounts to. Most probably the student who 
has the least desire to be an orator of any one in his 



To Mifs Felicia Hemans Jones. 217 

class is the one who is most certain to become one ; 
and perhaps you will readily see that he who is con- 
scious of possessing the orator's native power has least 
occasion to desire it. Of the great multitude who 
write, you know that only a few succeed. ]S"ine out 
of every ten fail — perhaps even a larger proportion 
than this. A very few of these fail, doubtless, through 
no real fault of their own, but through unfavorable 
circumstances ; while the most of them find to their 
mortification and their cost that their desire to write 
misled them entirely with regard to the work which 
nature intended them to do. So you see that I do not 
think much of desire as a guide to one's work in the 
world. Indeed, I think it the most unreliable index 
ever consulted. 

I think I understand the process through which 
your mind is constantly passing. You take up a book, 
from the pen of a favorite author, and you are refreshed 
and nourished and inspired by it. You are exalted by 
this communion with a highly vitalized and fruitful 
mind, and feel yourself longing for action and expres- 
sion of some kind. It is the most natural thing in the 
world for you to desire, before everything else, to be a 
writer. You admire the author who has inspired you. 
You imagine that the mind that lias within it the 
power to work such marvels upon you must be a su- 
premely happy mind. His position of power seems 
10 



218 Letters to the Jonefes. 

very enviable to you, — if not enviable, very desirable. 
The results of his efforts upon you are so good and so 
wonderful that it seems to you as if it must be a glo- 
rious thing to work them. You long to do for others 
what he has done for you. You long to be regarded 
with love and admiration as an inspirer. This is the 
same feeling that is excited in a sensitive mind by 
public speakers. Thousands of very commonplace men 
are excited by oratorical efforts in the pulpit and on the 
platform, to a strong desire to become public speakers. 
The desire to be preachers, or orators, or lecturers, or 
public debaters, is always excited in some minds by 
listening to the different varieties of public speaking, 
yet the most of these need only to try once to become 
convinced that desire is a very poor index to power. 

This desire to write is intimately connected with — 
perhaps it is one of the expressions of— the longing 
natural to every heart to be recognized. The heart 
that loves men, and is conscious of the wish and the 
power to bless them, longs for the recognition of men. 
All of us who are good for anything have this longing. 
We long for the recognition of our real value ; we long 
for # a place in the respect and the love of those around 
us. It is not unfrequently true that those whose affec- 
tions have been unsatisfied at home — whose plans of 
domestic life have miscarried — or who are immediately 
surrounded by those who will not, or who cannot sym- 



To Mifs Felicia Hemans Jones. 219 

pathize with them — who are every day associated with 
those by whom they are undervalued — turn to the 
public for that which has been denied them at home. 
I do not know whether I hit your case in these remarks 
or not, but I should think it strange if I did not. It 
is not common for a woman who is satisfied in her 
affections, who is surrounded by sympathetic friends, 
and who holds a good position securely, to care for, or 
even to think of recognition beyond. On the other 
hand, it is very common for women whose domestic 
surroundings and society are not satisfying to look to 
other fields for recognition, and to none so commonly 
as to that of authorship. 

In your letter to me; you speak of your wish to 
do good by writing. I do not question the sincerity 
of this wish. It may flow from the benevolence of 
your nature, developed by Christian culture, or it 
may have been inspired by the consciousness of 
good received from the writings of others. But 
you must remember that one's motives may be very 
good while one's native gifts may be but poorly 
adapted to literary effort. Your motives decide noth- 
ing as to your power. That you may readily see, 
by looking at the pulpit, filled by men whose motives 
are excellent, while the power of one half of them has 
never found demonstration, and never will. I have 
sometimes thought that there were no preachers in the 



220 Letters to the Jonefes. 

field who more uniformly have the noblest motives and 
the most charming Christian spirit than those who 
have not the slightest power in the pulpit. No person 
should write without good motives, but good motives 
alone never made a good book. Goodish books are 
written in great numbers by people who write with 
good motives and incompetent brains, but I suppose 
you do not care to write such books as these. 

I have made these remarks, not to prove to you 
that you are incompetent to write a book, and not for 
the purpose of making you believe that you are incom- 
petent. I have made them for the simple purpose of 
showing you that your strong desire to write, even 
when backed by the purest and most benevolent mo- 
tives, is no evidence that you can succeed. The world 
is full of the desire to do good and great things, and it 
is not lacking in worthy motives. You are not pe- 
culiar in these things. You share them to a greater 
extent than you suspect with your neighbors. You 
would probably be astonished to learn how many there 
are among your immediate friends who have been 
moved by the same desires that move you, yet you 
may be able to see that not one of them could succeed 
as a writer. There may be one among your friends, 
too, who has not had any desires about the matter, but 
who has written by a sort of natural necessity, with- 
out recognition or publication. What do you think 



To Mifs Felicia Hemans Jones. 221 



of such a man as Theodore Winthrop, who wrote quite 
a little library of books that could find no publisher 
until he was killed, and that have now made him fa- 
mous ? Such a man writes because it is a necessity of 
his nature to write, and I venture to say that he never 
sought advice on the subject. He certainly was not 
checked in production because the publishers would not 
print his books, and the public could not read them. 
Still, it is possible that you have just the native gifts 
that would command success in authorship, though I 
wish you to feel that the probabilities are against you, 
and to open your eyes to these probabilities. 

We will suppose that you have those native gifts 
which, under favorable conditions, would enable you 
to succeed, and we shall still have these conditions to 
look after. The first of these is the possession of 
something of genuine value to communicate. Your 
power of expression may be unsurpassed, and your 
style may be exceedingly attractive, but unless you 
have something of value to convey, these will avail you 
nothing. What have you of knowledge or wisdom to 
give to mankind ? How much have you thought and 
felt and lived ? How much more have you thought 
and felt and lived than those for whom you wish to 
write ? Do you, in your character and in the general 
results of your life, stand so far above the mass of 
mind around you, as to be able to inspire it and to 



222 Letters to the Jonefes. 

lead it to higher ground ? This question has a great 
deal more to do with your success in authorship than 
that which relates to the desire to write. This touches 
the vitalities of the matter. Have you knowledge 
which the world has not, and which the world needs ? 
Has your life led you through such paths of expe- 
rience and observation that you feel qualified to lead 
or direct others ? 

Another essential condition to success in authorship 
is time. To write a brief poem, or a clever little essay 
for a magazine -or a newspaper, it does not require 
much time. You can do this in the intervals of domes- 
tic labor, and it would be rather a help than a hinder- 
ance to labor. It would be quite likely to sweeten 
labor, and give significance to leisure, to have on hand 
the work of embodying in some good or graceful form 
some good or graceful thought for other eyes, but this 
would be playing at authorship. To succeed in a field 
which numbers among its competitors the brightest 
and best minds of the world — minds which devote all 
their time to their work — involves the entire devotion 
of one's time to the effort. Success in authorship can- 
not be won without time. The man who gains the ear 
of the world by the labor of ten years may be ac- 
counted fortunate. It is possible that an author may 
write a book very early in life which will be read, but 
it will be forgotten within a shorter time than he 



To Mifs Felicia Hemans Jones. 223 

occupied in writing it. A book lives by its value — 
by the amount of genuine life, or food for life, which, 
it contains ; and it takes time to collect this. Defoe, 
the author of " Robinson Crusoe," was also the author 
of more than two hundred other works, and it is more 
than likely that you never heard of any of his books 
except this that I have named. Yet this book was 
among his last. It was written after many years of 
authorship— the only book of all his life that had vi- 
tality enough in it to survive him. It took nearly 
sixty years of life, and more than thirty years of au- 
thorship, to bring him where he could write Robinson 
Crusoe. Mr. Motley, the now celebrated historian, 
began early as a novelist, and his book failed so signally 
that when he emerged from his obscurity as a histo- 
rian, nobody remembered the novel. Where do you 
suppose Mr. Motley spent the ten years, more or less, 
that divided the issues of the novel and the history ? 
He spent them in his study, at his desk, in patient 
labor, giving to his project the very best years of his 
life. 

Now will you ask yourself whether you have time 
to give to a life like this ? Do you realize how much of 
sacrifice it involves ? — sacrifice of health and society and 
domestic pleasures ? Are your plainly indicated do- 
mestic duties such as to permit you to devote yourself 
to a life like this ? Is the time that it would absorb, 



224 Letters to the Jonefes. 

so entirely at your disposal, through abundance of 
means for your support, that you could afford to run 
the risks of authorship ? This question of time is a 
very important one to a person who is poor. A writer 
may devote one or two years to writing a good book, 
and then look one or two years for a publisher, for the 
best books by new authors have notoriously begged 
for publishers. " Waverley " and " Uncle Tom's Cabin " 
and " Jane Eyre " were all beggars for publishers. 
You would not be apt to have a better fate. But sup- 
pose, after the usual working and waiting, you were to 
obtain a publisher. Then he waits for the proper time 
to bring out your book. It may be three months ; it 
may be a year. Six months after the day of publica- 
tion he will give you a note for whatever may be due 
you for copyright, payable in four or six months from 
its date. Do you think that this is an exaggeration ? 
Every author knows it is not. It is the simple truth, 
and many of them know that when the day of settle- 
ment has come, their copyright has amounted to noth- 
ing ; or they have found that their note, when they 
were fortunate enough to get one, has not been paid 
at maturity, on account of the failure of its maker. A 
man must be rich and independent or poor and des- 
perate, to afford to write a first book. There are 
hardly ten persons among the thirty millions of Ameri- 
ca who rely on the writing of books for a living, and 



To Mifs Felicia Hemans Jones. 225 



the most of those have a hard task of it. There is but 
one way in which a person who is dependent upon his 
labor for a living can write a book, and that is to write 
it in the intervals of labor, which labor is devoted to 
the simple purpose of getting a living. You will 
readily see that a writer thus engaged is at work very 
disadvantageously. 

Another condition of successful writing is patience. 
A man furnished with all the necessary means of sup- 
port, and impelled to write by the desire which moves 
you, and by your wish to do good, will find that, after 
the labor of a few weeks, the desire dies out. The 
impulse to write, born of the inspiration of the books 
which one reads, is very fiery and very fine at the first, 
but it is hard to stretch it over a period of six months 
or a year, through weariness, and headache, and con- 
finement, and doubt as to the result, and disgust with 
the failure to satisfy one's own taste and judgment. 
The man or the woman who writes on, after the origi- 
nal inspiration has lost its impulse — labors on in the 
drudgery of detail — in polishing, trimming, rewriting 
— comes at last to an irksome task, and is only sus- 
tained in it by a self-supported determination. A fresh 
interest will sustain labor, but when a book has been 
fully constructed in the mind, and realized in the imagi- 
nation, and nothing remains but the labor of writing 

a limited amount from day to day for many months, 

10* 



226 Letters to the Jonefes. 

all of which writing must be done before one can get 
any sympathy from others, it takes a will as patient 
and unyielding as that which a besieging army needs 
before a fortress that is to be approached by inches. 
Do you possess this patience — this persistence — this 
adamantine will — which will stand and command and 
do after desire and inspiration are gone, and even the 
motive of doing good has been discouraged ? 

I have thus attempted to show you how easily you 
may be misled as to your abilities by your desires, and 
what the conditions of successful writing must be, ad- 
mitting that your abilities are all that you suppose them 
to be. I have exaggerated . nothing, but tried to give 
you a faithful survey of the ground, so that if you still 
feel impelled to undertake writing, you may approach 
your task with a good understanding of its difficulties. 
If I were intent on discouraging you — if that were my 
motive at all — I might go further, and speak of what 
are supposed to be the " satisfactions " of authorship. 
I might tell you that the article which so inspired you 
probably left the author a disgusted man. It is more 
than probable that the books which have pleased and 
strengthened you most, are, at this very moment, re- 
garded by the writer as unworthy of him, and alto- 
gether unworthy of the purpose to which they were 
addressed. I might tell you of the incompetent criti- 
cism, the mean personal attacks, the careless condem- 



To Mifs Felicia Hemans Jones. 227 

nations, and worst of all, the nndiscriminating praises 
which are every successful author's lot. But as you do 
not propose to write to please yourself, and are actuated 
solely by the desire to do good, the effort would be 
irrelevant. It would be very painful to me to feel that 
I had dissuaded any man or woman from a legitimate 
career, or to know that I had turned aside any mind from 
a walk of usefulness ; but I cannot but believe that 
talk like this will save ten from failure for every one 
whom it will deter from success. There are many men 
and women who are always unsettled upon this matter. 
They feel that they suffer hardship from circumstances 
which prevent them from writing. I cannot but be- 
lieve that an intelligent survey of the difficulties of 
authorship, and a comprehension of the fallibility of 
the signs of power to succeed, usually relied upon, will 
settle this question forever in their minds. It is one 
of the curses of life to feel that we are out of place, 
and to feel that we might be doing something better 
than that which engages our powers. The world is 
full of the unsatisfied, multitudes of whom, I believe, 
turn their eyes to the field of authorship with desire, 
and with more or less of conviction that there are suc- 
cess and satisfaction in it for them. These people will 
never write, but they will always be thinking about 
it ; and they need something to turn them back upon 
their legitimate field for the satisfactions which they 



228 Letters to the Jonefes. 

seek. I believe this letter will have an influence on 
your mind, as well as on theirs. Of this, I feel meas- 
urably certain : if you were born for an authoress, you 
will find that within you which will set all my wisdom 
aside, and push on. There is a consciousness of power 
and a faith in success which I cannot define, but before 
which I bow; and if you have these — Heaven im- 
parted — I bid you God speed. But do not, I beg you, 
mistake a simple desire to write, which you share in 
common with thousands, for the divine impulse to 
which I allude. 



THE SIXTEENTH LETTER. 

C0 ffljit forte*. 

CONCERNING THE CHARACTER AND TENDENCIES OF THE 
FAST LIFE WHICH HE IS LIVING. 

I HA YE been watching you with painful solicitude 
for the last five years. You were originally what 
people call a wild boy, with no particular vices, but 
with strong passions and a great overflow of animal 
spirits. You came into manhood with a cigar in your 
mouth and a reputation for " spreeing," in both of 
which you apparently took a proud delight. You 
abused every horse that you had the opportunity of 
driving, and particularly affected a dashing turn-out. 
You liked the society of sporting men, and took natu- 
rally to their ways and their morals. You cut loose from 
the influence of the Christian friends around you, and 
broke the Sabbath, and frequented the haunts of vice, 
and engaged in scenes of dissipation, and laughed at 



230 Letters to the Jonefes. 

those who yielded themselves to the control of con- 
science. You are a good-natured person enough, but 
you are wicked, and while you maintain a place in 
respectable society, you are regarded with fear by the 
good and with suspicion by all. It is understood 
among the women that you are not a pure man, and 
it is known, by some of them, that you have abused 
the confidence of more than one. AH of your friends 
have heard sad reports of your sins when beyond their 
sight, and all regard you as a ruined man. 

I wish to call your attention particularly to this 
point, viz : that the community regard you as a ruined 
man already. You do not imagine this to be the case, 
at all. You have no idea that you are ruined, or that 
you are to be ruined. You are not aware that you 
have the reputation of being ruined. Now permit me 
to set you before yourself. 

You are not under the control of principle, in the 
slightest degree. You have some notions of honor, 
but they are entirely conventional. They would not 
keep you from breaking your pledge to a woman, or 
breaking her heart, and I say, therefore, that you have 
no principle — -not even the principle of personal honor 
which you doubtless suppose you have. There is, 
thus, nothing to restrain you from the most unscrupu- 
lous means for securing your personal ends, and noth- 
ing to stand between you and the gratification of your 



To Jehu Jones. 



231 



sensual desires, except the law. Now will you not 
decide for yourself how far a man in this position is 
from ruin ? Do you imagine that you are, to any ex- 
tent, under the control of principle ? Does principle 
restrain you from indulgence in strong drink ? Does 
principle withhold you from association with lewd 
women ? Does principle forbid your use of the pro- 
fane oath or the obscene jest ? You know it does none 
of these things. Then why do you fancy that you are 
controlled by principle ? Why do you fancy that there 
is anything within you to keep you from moral ruin ? 
If you are not ruined to-day, you are pretty certain to 
be very soon, because salvation involves reformation, 
at which you scoff. 

Let me ask you to look around you, and see what 
those have come to who began where you have begun. 
There goes your neighbor with a blotched and burning 
face and a stuffed skin, whose drink will just as cer- 
tainly kill him as if it were arsenic. He stood once 
where you stand to-day. He did not dream, ten years 
ago, that he was ruined ; but he has taken no new step 
to bring him where he now stands. He only continued 
to do what he was already doing. There was no prin- 
ciple to stand between him and destruction. He drank 
with his friends occasionally, then he drank with them 
habitually, then he drank alone to gratify a thirst 
which drink had created, and which will never die 



232 Letters to the Jonefes. 

while his vitiated body lives. Look at that other 
neighbor of yours, with a dark red skin and a troubled 
eye, who knows where he is going. It is not ten years 
since he was not even suspected of drinking, but it 
came out that he had learned in secret to love hot 
liquors, and that he had set his heart against reform. 
That man is in the straight road to hell and he knows 
it, and you, on the same road, stop at the wayside re- 
sorts and drink with him. Delirium tremens waits for 
that man and is sure of him. Look at that little circle 
of neighbors younger than those to whom I have called 
your attention. Do you see how they are changing ? 
Do you not see that they are growing preternaturally 
heavy, and that they are becoming more habitual in 
their visits to the dram-shop and in the indulgence in 
drink at home ? Have you any doubt as to where 
they will be in the course of ten years more ? 

Having looked at these, suppose you go with me to 
visit certain others who have arrived at the close of 
their journey. There sits one in his doorway — a mis- 
erable wreck, filled with gouty pains, unable even to 
taste of the liquor which has destroyed him, and loath- 
ing the food which he has no power to digest. There 
writhes another in torment — in a delirium whose hor- 
rors are beyond conception, as they are beyond de- 
scription. There sits another in the sun, from whom 
the flesh has all fallen away — who is left feeble and flao 



To Jehu Jones. 233 

cid and foolish— a poor, broken-down, diseased wretch, 
beyond the reach of help. There sinks another in par- 
alysis, a helpless mass of bloated flesh. 

What do you think of these men, Mr. Jehu Jones ? 
Does it seem as if that handsome face and those 
shapely limbs of yours could ever arrive at such degra- 
dation? You have only to keep along in the track 
which you now follow, with no fears and no compunc- 
tion of conscience, to pass through the various stages 
of ruin which these men have presented to you. There 
is but one end to a life of drink, and that is hell. It 
matters little whether the popular doctrine of future 
torment be admitted or not to make my statement 
good. A body long abused by drink becomes all that 
we can conceive of as hell. It is the dwelling-place 
of torment — the home of horror. You see these men 
on their way to ruin. You know just where they are 
going, and I see you are going on the same road, to 
the same end. Tell me whether you do not love drink 
better to-day that you did five years ago. Tell me 
whether it does not take more drink to satisfy you 
than it did five years ago. Tell me whether you are 
not drinking oftener than you did even two years ago. 
Tell me whether you do not think of it oftener when 
away from it than you did one year ago.' Tell me 
whether your conscience reproves you at all, and 
whether, under the accumulating evidences of your 



234 Letters to the Jonefes. 

essential ruin, you have felt the smallest alarm as to 
what may be the result of your indulgence. I see 
what you do not see — that you have acquired an appe- 
tite for liquor. You used to drink it only when on a 
frolic ; now you drink it every day. Now let me tell 
you what all observation and experience teach — that 
you will love it more and more as the years pass away, 
and will be less and less inclined to relinquish its use. 
Why should I not speak of you then as a ruined man ? 
There is another element that enters into your ruin. 
You have, for the past five years, consorted with ruined 
women. When you were younger, evil companions and 
evil desires and curiosity led you into their society. 
There were certain things in that society that disgusted 
you then. To-day you are at home in it. Sir, you are 
a beast. You delight in the company of women who 
shame the names of mother, sister and wife — of pros- 
titutes who sell for gold that which, in God's pure 
economy, is sacred to love — of women whose touch is 
pollution and whose hold upon you is damnation. Oh 
Heaven ! When I think of the young life around me 
that is permitting its feet to be directed into these 
terrible paths of sin — when I consider how seductive 
these paths are to youthful appetite and passion — when 
I remember how opportunity invites from ten thousand 
hiding-places — and when I realize that there is no vice 
which so deadens or destroys the moral sense as that 



To Jehu Jones. 235 

of licentiousness, I am sick and almost in despair. You 
are old in this vice, but there are those around me who 
are young in it, as you were once — boys, whose feet 
hang upon the verge of a precipice more fearful than 
death- — young men — with Christian mothers and pure 
sisters — whose characters are as base as their bodies 
are diseased. Do you shrink from this vice, and from 
the society which it involves ? Are you not in love 
with it — so much in love with it that you do not enjoy 
the society of pure women ? Are you not so much in 
love with it that the society of pure women only brings 
to you shameful suggestions ? And yet, you think you 
are not ruined ! Sir, you are rotten. If mind were 
subject to the laws of matter, and moral corruption 
were accompanied by the phenomena which character- 
ize physical decay, you would stink like carrion. 

I have no words with which to express my sense 
of the ruin which this single vice has wrought in you. 
Men who drink are sometimes reformed, and if they 
have not proceeded too far in their vice, they come 
back to a self-respectful manhood. The taint left upon 
tne morals is not so deep that it cannot be eradicated ; 
but a man who has been debauched by licentiousness, 
is incurable. I do not mean that he cannot reform, 
but that he must always be weak, and must always 
carry with him a sense of degradation and shame. 

Do you persist in believing that you are not ruined ? 



236 Letters to the Jonefes. 

There is, of course, one aspect of your case in which 
you are not. It is possible for you to reform* but 
you have no idea of reforming. You base no hopes or 
calculations on reformation. That is why I declare 
you to be ruined. You voluntarily block up the only 
way of escape from ruin. If a man, loving your wel- 
fare, speaks to you of reformation, you are angry with 
him. If he ventures to reprove you for your vices, 
you bid him mind his own business. You brace your- 
self against every influence which is intended to reform 
you. You join hands with those who are nearer the 
grand catastrophe of their lives than yourself. You 
scoff at temperance and purity in life. You laugh at 
religion. You glory in your independence of all weak 
and womanish notions of morals and of life, yet God 
knows that in these weak and womanish notions of 
morals and of life abides your only hope of deliverance 
from a career whose end is certain disaster and misery. 
Look at the poor women who share your debaucheries. 
Are they ruined, or are they not ? How great a chance 
does any one of them stand of reformation and a hap- 
py life ? Can you not see that their lives are morally 
certain to end in wreck ? Do you not know that their 
steps tend directly into the blackness of darkness — 
into a horrible tempest of remorse, whose bowlings 
even now ring in their ears in the intervals of artificial 
madness ? What are you better than they ? Yon ara 



To Jehu Jones. 237 



not better than they. They are your equals and your 
companions, travelling the same path — bound to the 
same perdition. 

Would to Heaven I /could paint to your imagina- 
tion the horrors of a lost life, that you and all who 
may gaze upon the picture might shrink from the gulf, 
and make haste to reach safer and higher ground ! I 
would call up to your vision your former self — the un- 
polluted boy and young man — full of life, and joy, 
and generous impulses, with inclinations drawing you 
toward sin, and pure influences from parents and home 
and heaven dissuading you from it. I would show you 
how, yielding to these better influences, you might now 
be an honored member of society, with a virtuous wife 
at your side, and pleasant children at your knee — with a 
smiling heaven above you, a safe future before you, an 
approving conscience within you— with conscious free- 
dom from the slavery of thirst and desire^-with self- 
respect, and that strength which comes from the posses- 
sion of the respect of others. I would show you all your 
possibilities of excellence in manhood, of virtuous hap- 
piness, of self-denying effort for the good of society, of 
domestic delight, of faith and confidence in a great and 
glorious future. And having shown you all these, I 
would show you all those — lost. I would show you a 
life that might have been that of an angel thrown away 
— its physical health and resources wasted in debauch 



238 Letters to the Jonefes. 

eries — its mind feasting only on impure imaginations, 
and delighting only in impure society — its heart reeking 
with corruption — its pure ambition dead — its present 
controlled by animal appetites, rendered foul by in- 
dulgence and fierce by their feverish food, and its 
future overclouded by fear. I would show you a man 
— 'the noblest being God has placed upon the earth — ■ 
thrown away — transformed into a beast — a gross, 
unreasoning thing, that glories in its appetites, and 
boasts of their indulgence — a being lost to decency, to 
self-respect, to happiness, to good society, to God — 
lost even to the poor inheritance of conscious shame. 

A lost life ! What is it ? Theologians stickle about 
words in describing the future of the vicious, but if 
any theologian can tell me how a man can live the life 
of a beast, subjecting his soul, with all its pure aspira- 
tions and inspirations, to the service of lust, and throw 
away his life in this miserable perversion, and be able 
to look back upon it from the other side of the dark 
river with anything but remorse, he will explain to me 
the strangest anomaly of the moral universe. Sir, the 
thing is impossible. A lost life is something that be* 
longs to a lost soul. What is in store for such a soul, 
of possible reform in the long ages which lie before it, 
I cannot tell. I only know that it has lost its best 
chance, and, so far as I know, its only chance, for ever- 
lasting happiness. I only know that such a soul must 



To Jehu Jones. 239 

go before its Maker a polluted thing, full of regret for 
its life of folly and of sin, consciously out of harmony 
with all pure and heavenly society, shorn by the death 
of its body of every source of pleasure. I know that 
you are losing your life — that you are marching straight 
into the jaws of physical and spiritual destruction. 
You refuse to reform. You scoff at reform. What 
remains ? A life — lost ! My God ! What a surren- 
der of thy gift is this ! 

It would be a gratification to me, sweeter than any 
material success, to turn your feet into the path of vir- 
tue ; but I have not much faith in so happy a result of 
this expostulation. For many, years I have watched 
the career of such men as you. Death has reaped a 
dozen crops of them within my short memory. The 
young men who occupied ten years ago the position 
which you occupy to-day, are nearly all of thenrdead. 
One remains, here and there, a played-out man, whom 
circumstances have restrained from going on to abso- 
lute suicide. The rest have hidden their faces in the 
grave, and no one speaks of them except as of men 
who lost their lives. Look back, yourself, and see 
how many of those with whom you have joined in 
carousal and debauchery are now dead. They are 
scattered all along the track of your dissipated life. 
How many of your companions have reformed ? Can 
you name one ? I hope you can name many, but if 



240' Letters to the Jonefes. 

you can, you are more fortunate than I am. ISTo, sir, 1 
have but little hope of saving you, though it would 
give me more joy than it would be possible for me to 
express to be able so to present to you your situation 
as to frighten you back from the precipice which you 
are rapidly approaching. If any entreaty of mine 
could save you, I would willingly get on my knees 
before you, and beg you to save yourself by immediate 
reform. I would do anything to arrest your progress 
to destruction, and I would do anything to turn the 
feet of those who are younger than you away from the 
life which you are leading. 

I have written you this public letter mainly -to 
arrest the attention and secure the salvation of those 
who are tempted as you were, when younger, to for- 
sake the path of temperance and purity. It is more 
than likely that when you commence this letter, and 
notice its drift, you will lay it down without reading 
it. It is more than likely that many young men who 
are not fallen, but who are liable to fall, will read the 
whole of it. It is mainly for the use and the warning 
of these men, that I have drawn your picture, and I 
place it before them with hopefulness of a good result, 
I would show them by your life whither license leads.' 
I would show them by your loss what illicit indulgence 
costs. I would warn them by the disasters and death 
of your friends to abstain from the intoxicating cup, 



To Jehu Jones. 241 



and to shun the house of her whose steps take hold on 
hell. Licentiousness, were it not the vice of all ages, 
might be called the special vice of this age. Certain it 
is that never in the history of Puritan America did this 
vice reap to its infectious bosom such harvests of the 
young as it is reaping now. Certain it is that this 
vice never spread its temptations before the public 
with such impunity as now. The community seems to 
be benumbed, discouraged by its boldness, strength, 
and prevalence. It literally advertises itself in the 
public streets, and no man lifts indignantly his voice 
against it. Ruin and riot thrive. The dram-shop and 
the brothel are everywhere, and into either of these no 
man can go without endangering both his body and 
his soul. You, Mr. Jehu Jones, will sometime know 
how precious a possession is in the hands of these, 
young men — know when you would give the world, 
were it yours, to win back the innocence and health 
and peace which you will have forever lost — know 
when you would esteem it a privilege to adjure them 
to keep their bodies and their souls from the grasp of 
those appetites which will have borne you into the 
realm of despair, 
11 



THE SEVENTEENTH LETTER. 

&0 S^amns gtrnofo f ones, Sftjpolmasfer. 

CONCERNING THE REQUIREMENTS AND THE TENDENCIES 
OF HIS PROFESSION. 

"ITT THEN I review the life and character of Dr. 
T y Thomas Arnold — to honor whom your name 
was given to you — it is easy for me to understand why 
he was so great a schoolmaster. He was a profound 
scholar, surpassing in attainments most of the profes- 
sional men of his time. He was a rare historian, with 
a minute knowledge and a philosophical appreciation 
of modern times, and that mastery of antiquity which 
enabled him to write a History of Rome that compe- 
tent critics have characterized as " the best history in 
the language." He was a theologian of the highest 
class, paying but little respect to systems constructed 
by men, but drawing directly from the fountain of all 
theological knowledge — the Bible. Above all, he was 



To Thomas Arnold Jones. 243 

a man — -a large-hearted, catholic man — a gentle, loving 
man — full of enthusiasm — devoted to reform — in con- 
stant communication with the best minds of his age 
through a private correspondence, which astonishes all 
who now look upon its record — a laborious, conscien- 
tious, Christian man. Knowing all this of the man, it is 
not surprising to me that he was the greatest school- 
master of his generation, or that we cannot find his 
peer among the schoolmasters of to-day. 

I heard some years ago that you had " fitted " your- 
self " for teaching " — that you proposed to make teach- 
ing the business of your life. I know comparatively 
little about you, personally, but I know what, in the 
definitions of the day, fitting one's self for teaching 
means. It is commonly understood that when a man 
is " fitted for teaching," he is fitted to conduct recita- 
tions in the various branches pursued in the ordinary 
schools, having thoroughly gone through the usual text- 
books himself. If a man knows grammar, he is " fit- 
ted " to teach grammar. If a man has learned arith- 
metic and natural philosophy, and astronomy and mor- 
al science, as he finds them in the accredited text-books, 
he is " fitted " to teach all those branches of learning. 
We hear constantly of young men and women who 
are " fitting themselves for teaching," and we know 
exactly what the process is. We hear often of those 
who travel in foreign parts as a preparation for labor 



244 Letters to the Jonefes. 

in the pulpit, and in other professions, but I do not 
remember an instance of travel, undertaken by manor 
woman, as a preparation for teaching. " Fitness " for 
teaching seems to consist solely in the ability to con- 
duct recitations, and when this ability is compassed, so 
that a candidate for the teacher's office is able to pass 
an examination before a board more or less competent 
for the service, he is " fitted for teaching." 

It is true that teachers fitted in this way for their 
work are competent to impart what, in the common 
language of the time, is called " an education." With 
all that is written intelligently on this subject of educa- 
tion at the present time — and in my judgment the sub- 
ject is better understood now.than it has ever been be- 
fore — it is astonishing how almost universally it is the 
opinion that education consists in the cramming into a 
child's mind the contents of a pile of text-books. I do 
not think that I exaggerate at all when I say that three 
quarters of the teachers of American youth practically 
consider fitness for teaching to consist in the ability to 
conduct recitations from the usual text-books, and that 
three quarters of the people who have children to be 
educated regard education as consisting entirely in ac- 
quiring the ability to answer such questions as these 
teachers may propose from the text-books in their 
hands. The larger view of teaching and of education 
is not the prevalent view. Teaching is conducted 



To Thomas Arnold Jones. 245 

often by men who are not competent to do anything, 
else. They take up teaching as a preparation for other 
work. A man teaches as a preparation for preaching 
— as a stepping stone to something better— as a means 
of earning money to enable him to learn some other 
work. " Fitness for teaching " seems to come a long 
time before fitness for anything else comes, and is cer- 
tainly not regarded as indicating a very high degree 
of intellectual advancement. 

I have no means of knowing how far I have defined 
your notions, or your attainments, in these statements, 
but I have prepared you, certainly, for the proposition 
that real fitness for teaching only comes with the most 
varied and generous culture, with the best talents en- 
thusiastically engaged, and the noblest Christian char- 
acter. Dr. Arnold was a great schoolmaster simply 
because he was a great man. His " fitness " for hear- 
ing recitations was the smallest part of his fitness for 
teaching. Indeed, it was nothing but what he shared 
in common with the most indifferent of his assistants 
at Rugby. His fitness for teaching consisted in his 
knowledge of human nature and of the world, his pure 
and lofty aims, his self-denying devotion to the work 
which employed his time and powers, his lofty exam- 
ple, his strong, generous, magnetic manhood. That 
which fitted him peculiarly for teaching was precisely 
that which would have fitted him peculiarly for any 



246 Letters to the Jonefes. 

other high office in the service of men. His knowl- 
edge of the ordinary text-books may not have been 
greater than that which you possess. His excellence as 
a teacher did not reside in his eminence as a scholar 
and a man of science, though that eminence is undis- 
puted ; but in that power to lead and inspire — to rein- 
force and fructify — the young minds that were placed 
in his care. He filled those minds with noble thoughts. 
He trained them to labor with right motives for grand 
ends. He baptized them with his own sweet and 
strong spirit. He glorified the dull routine of toil by 
keeping before the toilers the end of their toil — a 
grand character — that power of manhood of which so 
noble an example was found in himself. 

Now, my friend, how well fitted for teaching are 
you, tried by the standard which I place before you in 
the character of Dr. Arnold ? I do not ask whether 
you are as great and good a man as Dr. Arnold. I do 
not require that you should be as great and good as 
he ; but I ask you whether you now regard, or wheth- 
er you have ever regarded — save in the most general 
sense — this matter of fitness for teaching as being 
anything more than fitness to govern a school, and con- 
duct recitations intelligently? Having acquired this 
sort of fitness sufficiently to enable you to get a posi- 
tion, are you pushing on in the pursuit of that higher 
fitness which will give you the power of an inspirer of 



To Thomas Arnold Jones. 247 

the youth who are placed in your charge ? That is the 
question most interesting not only to your pupils, but 
to you. Are you making progress as a man, by con- 
stant culture ? Are you bringing your mind into com- 
munication with other minds, that you may gain vital- 
ity and force by contact and collision ? Are you read- 
ing — studying — striving to lift yourself out of the dead 
literalism of your recitation-rooms, so that you can win 
higher ground, whither you may call the youug feet 
that grow weary with plodding? Outgrowing all 
bondage to forms and" 1 technicalities and mere words 
and names, have you mastered ideas, so that you can 
give vitality to your teachings ? Do these text-books, 
to the mastery of which you devoted some years, and 
in the exposition of which you now spend much of 
your time, still enthrall you with the thought that they 
hold the secret of an education within their covers ; or, 
standing above them, do you look down upon them as 
rudimentary, and as things which, in the consummation 
of an education, are left far behind ? 

In the course of your own education, you were, as 
I happen to remember, placed under the tutelage of 
several different masters. Will you now look back 
and recall them all, and tell me which of them you 
remember with the most grateful pleasure ? Tell me 
which of them all did you the most good — which of 
them left the deepest mark upon your character, and 



248 Letters to the Jonefes. 

accomplished most in building up and furnishing your 
mind ? Was it the most learned man of them all, or 
was it the wisest man ? Was it he who was most at 
home in the text-books, or he whose mind was fullest 
of ideas ? I know that you can give but one answer 
to my question. The answer will be that he who was 
the most of a man was the best teacher, and the name 
of that one will always awaken your enthusiasm. You 
have been peculiarly unfortunate if you have not, Tat 
some time in your life, been under a teacher who had 
the power to inspire you to such an extent that all 
study became a pleasure to you 5 and the school-room, 
with its tasks and competitions and emulations, the 
happiest spot which the earth held. And now, when 
you look back to this man, or when you hear his name 
mentioned, your mind kindles with a new fire, as if 
you had touched one of the permanent sources of your 
moral and intellectual life. Your best teacher was the 
man who aroused you— who gave you high aims and 
lofty aspirations — who made you think, and taught 
you to organize into living and useful forms the 
knowledge which he helped you to win. In short, he 
was not the man who crammed you, but the man who 
educated you — who educed those powers in which re- 
side your real manhood. 

I wish to impress upon you the great truth that 
your excellence and success as a teacher depend en* 



To Thomas Arnold Jones. 249 

tirely upon the style and strength of your manhood. 
The ability to maintain order in a school, and to con- 
duct recitations, with measurable intelligence, is not 
extraordinary. It is possessed by a large number of 
quite ordinary people, but that higher power to which 
I have attempted to direct your attention is extraordi- 
nary. The teachers are not many who possess it, or 
who intelligently aim to win it. It is not a garment 
to be put on and taken off like a coat, but it is the re- 
sult of the loving contact of a generous nature with 
those great and beautiful realities of which the text- 
books only present us the dry definitions. The great- 
est naturalist of this country — perhaps the greatest of 
any country — is a teacher Whose equal it would be 
hard to find among a nation of teachers ; and this is 
true, not because he knows so much, but because he is 
so much. No young mind can come within the reach 
of his voice and influence without being touched by 
his sublime enthusiasm. ~No pupil ever speaks** of him, 
save with brightened or moistened eyes. I have heard 
women pronounce his name in many places, scattered 
between Maine and the Mississippi, and always in such 
terms of gratitude and praise that it has seemed as if 
the brightest days which they recalled were not those 
of childhood, and not those spent with parents, or lov- 
ers, or husbands, but those passed at the feet of that 
noblest of educators and inspirers — Agassiz. 
11* 



250 Letters to the Jonefes. 

I have already intimated that this question as to 
what kind of a teacher you are to be is quite as im- 
portant to yourself as to your pupils. The character 
of a schoolmaster has been, in the years that are past, 
notoriously a dry one. It is really sad to see with how 
little affection many old teachers are regarded by those 
who were once their pupils. There are men who, hav- 
ing spent twenty-five years of their lives in teaching, are 
always spoken of by the boys who have been under 
their charge as " old " somebody or other. " Old 
Boggs," or "Old Noggs," or "Old Scroggs " has 
stories told about him, and is never mentioned in terms 
of respect — much less in terms of affection. Now why 
is it that these men are remembered so lightly ? It is 
simply because they are teachers, and not men. They 
are all good scholars enough, but they have not that in 
their characters and personalities that wins the love 
and respect of their pupils. I suppose it must be ad- 
mitted that there is something in the business of teach- 
ing which tends to make the character dry. The drudg- 
ery and detail of teaching are hardly more interesting 
than the drudgery and detail of the work of the farm, 
or of the kitchen. Indeed, I think the work of hand- 
ling the rake and the hay-fork a more refreshing exer- 
cise for the mind and body than that of turning over 
and over again a verb, or a sum in simple addition, or 
even a proposition in Euclid. This everlasting hand- 



To Thomas Arnold Jones. 251 

ling of materials that have lost their interest is a very 
depressing process, to a mind capable of higher work ; 
and a mind that can interest itself in such work, and 
find real satisfaction in it, is necessarily a dry and un- 
lovely one. Do not misunderstand me with regard tc 
this latter statement. A teacher may be interested in 
his routine of labor through the effect that he aims to 
work upon the young minds before him, and he should 
be intensely interested in it ; but there is a class of 
teachers who seem to be really interested in the drudg- 
ery of repetition, and these are always dry characters, 
and they grow dryer and dryer until they die. 

You have fitted yourself for teaching, in the usual 
way. You are prepared, by the mastery of your text- 
books, to " teach school." The probability is that you 
^will never have any pupils who will be as familiar with 
these books as yourself, and, so far as maintaining 
your position is concerned, you will have nothing to 
do but to handle over and over again familiar and 
hackneyed materials. Whatever there may be of moral 
and mental nutriment in these materials, you have al- 
ready appropriated and digested. There is in them no 
further growth for you, and, so far as any good to you 
is concerned, you might as well handle over so many 
dry stioks. Exactly here is where a multitude of 
teachers stop. They never take a step in advance. 
The work of teaching is severe, and when they are 



252 Letters to the Jonefes* 

through with their daily tasks, they are in no mood lor 
study, or experiment, or intellectual culture in any 
broad and generous sense. Any mind will starve on 
such a diet as this, and the work of instruction be- 
comes to such a mind degraded below the position of 
an intellectual employment. I warn you against the 
danger of falling into this unfruitful routine, which is 
certain to dwarf you, and give you a dry and unattrac- 
tive character. You must make intellectual growth 
and progress by the means of fresh intellectual food, or 
you must retrograde. 

There is another reason why the business of teach- 
ing has a tendency to injure the character. While con- 
tact with young and fresh natures tends to soften and 
beautify character under some circumstances, I doubt 
whether this influence is much felt by those who are 
engaged in teaching. We take into our mouths some 
varieties of fruits as a corrective, which would hardly 
be regarded as the best of daily food. We take 
medicines which operate kindly for a brief period, 
but, if they are continued longer, the system becomes 
accustomed to them, and they lose their medicinal 
effect. It is thus with the influence of children. To 
the literary man, or the man of business, the occasional 
society of children and youth is very grateful and re- 
freshing, but it soon tires, and if necessarily long con- 
tinued, becomes irksome. A really vigorous and healthy 



To Thomas Arnold Jones. 253 

mind, forced to remain long in contact with the ininda 
of children, turns with a strong appetite toward matu- 
rity for stimulus and satisfaction. Now you are obliged 
to spend the most of your time with children, or those 
whose minds are immature. You are almost constantly 
with those who know less than you do, and in this so- 
ciety you will be quite likely to forget — as many school- 
masters have forgotten before you — that you are not 
the wisest and most learned man in the world. It is 
under these circumstances that pedants are made, alike 
conceited and contemptible. To a mature mind, there 
is no intellectual stimulus in the constant society of the 
immature, and you are certain to become a dwarfed 
man if you do not mingle freely in the society of your 
equals and your superiors. I do not know of a man in 
the world who, more than the teacher, needs the cor- 
rective and refreshing and liberalizing influences of 
general society and generous culture, to keep him from 
irreparable damage at the hand of his calling. You 
must mix with thinking men and women, and you 
must feed yourself with the products of fruitful lives, 
in books, or your degeneration is certain ; and you 
will come to be regarded as a dry, pedantic, uninterest- 
ing man. 

A man or a woman who does nothing but deal out 
small facts to small minds is certain to become over 
critical in small things. You have not been a school- 



254 Letters to the Jonefes. 



master so long as to forget the peculiar emotion once 
excited in you by the presence of a " school-ma'am." 
Before this day of larger ideas, to be a school-ma'am 
was to be a stiff, conceited, formal, critical character, 
which it was not altogether pleasant for a man to come 
into contact with. There seemed to be something in 
the work which these women performed that threw 
them out of sympathy with the free and easy world 
around them. They carried all the formal proprieties, 
all the verbal precisenesses, all the pattern dignities of 
the school-room, into society ; and one could not help 
feeling that they had lost something of the softness 
and sweetness and roundness that belong to the unper- 
verted female nature. All this has been improved by 
the modern correctives, but the reminiscence will help 
you to comprehend one phase of the danger to which 
you are exposed. I think that if the world were to 
give its unbiassed testimony touching this subject, it 
would say that it has found teachers to be men who 
give undue importance to small details, and who seem 
to lose the power to regard and treat the great ques- 
tions which interest humanity most in a large and lib- 
eral way. 

And now, before closing, let me do the honor to 
your position which I find it in my heart to give, for I 
hold that position second to none. The Christian 
teacher of a band of children combines the office of 



To Thomas Arnold Jones. 255 

the preacher and the parent, and has more to do in 
shaping the mind and the morals of the community 
than preacher and parent united. The teacher who 
spends six hours a day with my child, spends three 
times as many hours as I do, and twenty-fold more 
time than my pastor does. I have no words to express 
my sense of the importance of your office. Still less 
have I words to express my sense of the importance 
of having that office filled by men and women of the 
purest motives, the noblest enthusiasm, the finest cul- 
ture, the broadest charities, and the most devoted 
Christian purpose. Why, sir, a teacher should be the 
strongest and most angelic man that breathes. "No 
man living is intrusted with such precious material. 
No man living can do so much to set human life to a 
noble tune. No man living needs higher qualifications 
for his work. Are you " fitted for teaching ? " I do 
not ask you this question to discourage you, but to 
stimulate you to an effort at preparation which shall 
continue as long as you continue to teach. 



THE EIGHTEENTH LETTER. 

(£0 Prs. gcsa: f rrpht f cm*, 

CONCERNING HER DISLIKE OF ROUTINE AND HER DESIRE 
FOR CHANGE AND AMUSEMENT. 

YOU, who were Rosa Hoppin, when I first met 
you — a restless child — have married into the 
great Jones family, and henceforward, through all 
time, the blood of the Hoppins will mingle with that 
of the Joneses. What changes will be wrought by 
this combination of strange currents does not now 
appear, though I suspect that they will not be strongly 
marked. Indeed, I am inclined to believe that there 
have been Hoppins in the family before, for I find 
many Joneses who constantly remind me of the Hop- 
pins, and any number of the Hoppins whose ways are 
suggestive of the Joneses. 

The children of the Hoppins do not differ in any 
essential respect from the children of the Joneses. 



To Mrs. Rosa Hoppin Jones. 257 



Pretty nearly all children are, or might be, Hoppin s. 
They live upon little excitements. They are constantly 
on the alert for new sources of pleasure. They delight 
in being away from home, in new and strange places. 
They are miserable without society and miserable with- 
out change. Children have no power of application 
to the performance of duty, no sources of interest and 
amusement within themselves — no love of work. They 
grasp a new toy with eagerness, and tire of it before 
it is broken. The moment they are compelled to, sit 
down, they seize upon a book, or ask for a story, or 
whine with discontent. They are unhappy unless 
something is going on for their amusement, or they 
are going somewhere, or doing something, with amuse- 
ment for their special object. The genuine Hoppins 
rarely outgrow this disposition, but carry it with them 
to their graves. The Hoppins do not sit down quietly 
in their houses of an afternoon, unless compelled to do 
so by circumstances. They are either in the street, or 
at the house of a neighbor. In the evening, either 
their houses are full of Hoppins, or they are out visit- 
ing Hoppins, or attending some place of amusement, 
or doing something at home to make them forget that 
they are at home. ^Nothing so weighs down the spirit 
of a Hoppin as home duty, and the confinement which 
it involves. Children are half-hated because they inter- 
fere with indulgence in the passion for going some- 



258 Letters to the Jonefes. 

where and doing something pleasant, and husbands 
become bores when they happen to love home, and 
love to find there a thrifty and contented home-life. 

You— Mrs. Rosa Hoppin Jones — are still a child. 
You are married, and you have children, but I do not 
see that you are changed at all. You have the same 
love of novelty that possessed you when you were a 
little girl — the same greed for change — the same hor- 
ror of staying at home — the same fondness for " visit- 
ing" — the same restless impatience with work — the 
same desire for constant and Varied amusement. You 
are fond enough of dress, but dress does not absorb 
you. You tire of the old dresses it is true, and greet 
the new ones with genuine pleasure, but, after all, 
dress is not your passion. Fine dress costs you too 
much care and trouble, and personal vanity is not your 
besetting weakness. You would willingly leave all 
this matter of fine dress to Mrs. Royal Purple Jones 
and her circle, if you could be permitted to have what 
you call " a good time." You delight in a party, or a 
picnic, or an excursion, or a play, or a pageant, or a 
circus, or an Ethiopian concert, or a frolic of any kind ; 
and you never pass a day at home, even when you have 
around you the society you love best, without the sense 
of irksomeness. You will either have your house full 
of those who destroy all the sweet privacy and com- 
munion of home-life, or you will invade the home-life 



To Mrs. Rofa Hoppin Jones. 259 

of some other person — Hoppin or otherwise. And .yet, 
madam, I like yon. You are not a disagreeable person 
at all. Your nature is affectionate and pleasant, your 
tastes are social, you are generous, and pure, and true- 
hearted — as much so as you were when you were a 
child. Your husband is fond of you, and proud of 
you. He has tried to adapt himself to you, and to take 
delight in that which most interests you ; yet I can- 
not but think that a man who carries his burden of 
care would delight most in a quiet home, and in 
the certainty of finding a contented wife in it, when- 
ever he comes back from the Work by which he sup- 
ports it. 

There are some women in the world — and you 
seem to be one of them — who never heartily, and with 
devoted purpose, enter upon the work of life. You 
do what you are compelled to do by circumstances. 
If circumstances should compel you to do nothing, you 
would do nothing.. All work is an interference with 
your favorite pursuits, or your mode of spending time. 
Nothing would be more agreeable to you than to have 
the privileges of going, and gadding, and seeking for 
fresh amusements all your life. You certainly must 
recognize a difference between yourself and many esti- 
mable women of your acquaintance. You know many 
women who, from choice, and on their individual re- 
sponsibility, have undertaken a life-long task to which 



2(50 Letters to the Jonefes. 

they cheerfully and systematically devote their powers. 
They keep their houses, and understand the minutest 
affairs connected with them. They devote themselves 
to the right training, in body, mind and morals, of the 
little ones born of them. In society, they are the re- 
liable ones — the women of character and consideration. 
They are women who use time for good ends, outside 
of themselves, and who take delight in actionem the 
useful employment of their powers. You must, I re- 
peat, recognize a difference between yourself and these 
women. They have their life in exertion ; you have 
yours in amusement. You exercise no power, but find 
your sweetest satisfaction in the varied impressions 
that are made upon your sensibilities. 

• There is another class of women from whom you 
must find yourself differing very appreciably. I allude 
to those whose greatest delight is in opportunities for 
culture. If you read a book, you read it for the same 
purpose that a child reads. You read only for amuse- 
ment. You never read for instruction. The idea of 
taking up a book for purposes of study, is one that 
never occurs to you ; and you have no delight in a 
book that taxes your mind. Whatever you read must 
amuse you — interest you — absorb you — or you lay it 
down and call it stupid. There is no culture in such 
reading as this — there is only dissipation. You read a 
oook for the same purpose that you attend a theatre. 



To Mrs. Rofa Hoppin Jones. 261 

or engage in a frolic — for the simple purpose of having 
your emotional nature excited, and your sensibilities 
played upon. You never seek for mental nourishment 
or mental exercise anywhere. Thus, though you read 
a great deal, and really enjoy some works that are 
enjoyable by sensible people, you gain nothing. You 
read for momentary excitement, and win nothing of 
permanent use. You cannot weigh a book. You can- 
not even talk about a book, further than to say, that 
you like it or dislike it. The philosophy or the lesson 
of a novel or a poem is never grasped by you ; and 
every book you read is to you just what Mother 
Goose's Melodies are to the child, and no more. 

You must also perceive a difference between your- 
self, and those who love society for society's sake. 
There are many women who love society because of 
the mental stimulus it brings them — because, in the 
presence of intelligent and sprightly men and women, 
they feel themselves brightened and strengthened, and 
because they find in such society the most grateful op- 
portunity to act upon others. They are talking people 
who think before talking, and who think while they 
talk. I have noticed that while you are exceedingly 
fond of society, you always shun these people. You 
can talk nonsense, after a fashion, but your special de- 
light is in hearing other people talk nonsense ; and the 
man or the woman in society who says the drollest 



262 Letters to the Jonefes. 

things, and "runs on" in the wildest way, and does 
the most to amuse you and to relieve you from the ne- 
cessity of either thinking or talking, is the one who 
monopolizes your attention. If you have any special 
horror, it attaches to being cornered with a sensible 
man or woman, and being expected to talk sense with 
them. You see, therefore, that you do not go into 
society with anything in your hand to pay for that 
what you receive, except your agreeable person, your 
willing ears, and your ready and complimentary laugh. 
These make you popular enough ; but are you not just 
a little ashamed to think that your love of society 
would be destroyed if you could find in society none 
but those who have brains and a disposition to use 
them in sensible talk ? Are you not ashamed that all 
social circles are stupid to you in the degree that they 
are brilliant to the wise and the intellectual and the 
ready-witted ? Are you not ashamed that the clever 
buffoon of a company interests you most, and helps 
you most to what you call " a good time." 

You must also perceive that you are very different 
from those women to whom home is the sweetest spot 
on the earth. I know many women who have be- 
come so much enamored of home that they will never 
leave it willingly. They never go into society without 
a sense of sacrifice. They cling to home as if they had 
grown to it — as if every tendril of their heart-life had 



To Mrs. Rofa Hoppin Jones. 263 

wound itself around its pleasant things, and could only 
be dislocated by violence. This love of home and this 
self-confinement to its walls and its duties may become, 
and often does become, an intensely morbid passion of 
the soul — just as much to be deprecated as an unhealthy 
love of change — but you cannot but feel that a supreme 
love of home and devotion to its duties are very lovely, 
and that the best women you know entertain this love 
and this devotion far beyond yourself. Your home is 
not your refuge, so much as the home of your neigh- 
bor is. When you wish to be happy — when you feel 
the need of some soothing and comforting influence — 
you do not draw the curtains of your home about you, 
" and draw the loved ones of home closer to your heart, 
but you rush to the house of a neighbor that you may 
forget your troubles in the diversions of lively society. 
Your life is not at home. Home is mainly your board- 
ing place ; and if there were no such thing as " visit- 
ing " to be done, you would feel life to be shorn of 
most of its attraction. In short, you are never so much 
at home as you are when you are not at home. You 
are affected by a chronic mental uneasiness which pre- 
vents you from remaining long in any place — especially 
in any place to which a duty holds you. 

I have thus endeavored to reveal you to yourself, 
by calling your attention to the contrast which you — 
consciously I must believe — present to four different 



264 Letters to the Jonefes. 

classes of women worthy to be respected and loved, 
namely : to those who,, by definite purpose, have 
devoted themselves to a life of active duty at home 
and in society ; to those whose satisfactions are found 
in culture and its opportunities ; to these who love 
society for the mental stimulus and strength it im- 
parts, and to those who are supremely in love with 
Home and its quiet enjoyments. To one of these four 
classes, or to sundry or all of them combined, you 
must know that the best women of this world belong ; 
and I believe that you have sense enough to understand, 
and sensibility enough to feel that you are not of this 
number. You are a frivolous woman, constantly on the 
look-out for new sources of pleasure, and with no definite 
purpose except to get along as easily as possible with 
such duties as circumstances have forced upon you, and 
to have just as many " good times " as circumstances 
will permit you to have. 

Will you permit me now to say, in all frankness, 
that I believe yon to be made for something better 
than this ? You have qualities of body and mind and 
heart out of which a noble woman may be made — 
qualities which I cannot help admiring any more than 
I can help loving the light. Your nature is open and 
frank, and you will admit at once everything I have 
said concerning yourself. You possess a pleasant tem- 
per and a pure flow of animal spirits, and an affectionate 



To Mrs. Rofa Hoppin Jones. 



265 



nature, and a general desire that others may have just 
as good a time as you have. But you get no mental 
growth, you accomplish no worthy purpose, you are 
not the steadily radiant centre of a worthy home life. 
You are not doing a true woman's work in the world, 
for husband, children and friends, or gaining a true 
woman's wealth of character and culture. You are, as 
I have told you before, a child, with children on your 
lap and at your knee — children who do not very pro- 
foundly respect you — children whose acute percep- 
tions have already learned your weakness — children 
who already treat you like a child. Are you never to 
be a woman ? You ought not only to love home, but 
you ought to be the abiding corner-stone of home. 
Your husband's house is not home without your pres- 
ence and your presidency. That restless mind of yours 
should have steady work and healthy food. It should 
have a business — work that will engage its powers in 
the accomplishment of a worthy object — work that will 
fill your time and make these " visits " of yours, and 
these " good times " of yours, the healthy diversions 
and not the absorbing pursuits of your life. There 
is a world of life and power in you. It only needs to 
be held and trained and put to noble, womanly service. 
I hope you are not so badly dissipated that your will 
has lost the decision necessary to execute the wish 
which I am certain now springs in your heart. 

12 



266 Letters to the Jonefes. 

If you should undertake reform let me warn you 
against a mistake that you will be quite likely to make. 
There are not a few women in the world, considered 
very useful and pious persons, who are useful and pious 
in the same way that you are useless and dissipated. 
They are just as fond of change and excitement as you 
are, and, being of a religious turn of mind, they seek 
religious excitements, and suppose themselves to be in 
the path of duty. They attend a prayer meeting, or 
make visits to the poor, or wait at a hospital, or go to 
a benevolent sewing-circle, or distribute religious read- 
ing, or minister to the sick, or attend a stranger's 
funeral, for the change and the excitement which they 
find in these things. They are just as fond of being 
away from home as you are, and they seek excitement 
and amusement for the same reason. I do not think 
that I entertain more respect for them than for you. 
Perhaps the sort of dissipation which they choose is 
preferable to yours, but their motives can hardly be 
called better. Some of these women neglect their 
home duties very much, and they do it simply because 
they cannot obtain in them the excitement and amuse- 
ment which they seek. Many of them are out on what 
they suppose to be purely religious or benevolent er- 
rands, when they ought to be at home with their hus- 
bands and children. Becoming like these women, you 
would only change your style of dissipation, without 



To Mrs. Rofa Hoppin Jones. 267 

essentially changing your motive, or working a de< 
sirable revolution in your home-life. 

No ; you must learn the difficult lesson that in 
routine lives the real charm of life and the essential 
condition of progress and growth. That which is now 
irksome to you, must be heartily recognized as essential 
to your happiness. You must learn to be happy in the 
performance of a daily round of duty at home, and 
learn to be dissatisfied unless that daily round of duty 
shall be performed. You must learn to take most 
pleasure in those excitements which flow from action, 
not passion. These excitements of sensibility in which 
you have your life are legitimately only diversions from 
routine. Ah ! this routine which is so hateful to you ! 
Why — madam — routine is the road to heaven and God. 
Routine is the pathway of the stars and the seasons, 
the song of the tides, the burden of all the generations. 
The clouds sing it to the meadow, the meadow to the 
brook, the brook to the river, the river to the sea, and 
the sea to the clouds again, in everlasting circles of 
beauty and ministry. Routine is the natural path of 
all true human life. It is in this path that the feet 
grow strong and steady, and the soul adjusts itself 
familiarly to its conditions. It is in this path only that 
genuine peace and contentment are found ; and you 
must, of stern and settled purpose, hold yourself to this 
path until you feel the upward lift of its spiral round, 



268 Letters to the Jonefes. 

and know that you are reaching a calmer atmosphere 
and a more womanly because a diviner life. Never be 
afraid of routine. It has in it the secret of your refor- 
mation and the condition of your success. 

If you could but see, as I see, what a grace thought- 
fulness would give your character, and could meas- 
ure, as my imagination measures, the loveliness that 
would come to you through the chastening of your 
wayward impulses by work and self-devotion, I am sure 
you would fall in love with the picture, and make any 
sacrifice to realize its truthfulness. It pains me to see 
you so frivolous, so childish, so incapable of work, so 
impatient of home restraint and routine, so fond of 
wandering, so devoted to amusement and play ; for I 
know that the time must come when those animal 
spirits of yours will droop, when the little delights that 
now entertain you will become insipid, and when you 
will learn that your life has been wasted, in a child- 
hood that rotted at last without ripening into woman- 
hood. 



THE NINETEENTH LETTER. 
®a feforson Jafris forces, ^oliticmrr. 

CONCERNING THE IMMORALITY OF HIS PURSUITS, AND 
THEIR EFFECT UPON HIMSELF AND HIS COUNTRY. 

THE love of that which we call country is among 
the highest and noblest passions of the soul. 
The love that kindles into joyful enthusiasm at the 
sight of the national symbol, that feels, personally, 
every insult offered to its object, that burns brightest 
in absence, that is full of chivalry and bravery and self 
devotion, that sacrifices itself on battle fields, and 
counts such sacrifice a joy and a glory, that lives even 
after country is lost, and passes down through many 
generations as a precious inheritance — this, if not reli- 
gion, in one of its forms of manifestation, is certainly 
its next of kin. Indeed, there is something of every 
love, and of all love, in patriotism. Country is the 
patriot's mistress, his father and his mother, his broth- 



270 Letters to the Jonefes. 

er and his sister, his home, his teacher, his friend, his 
treasure — the storehouse into which he garners all his 
affections — heavenly and human — all his interests, as- 
pirations, hopes ; and when necessity demands it, he 
turns his face and feet from mistress, father, mother, 
brother, sister, home, friend, and treasure, and gives 
himself to his country, in obedience to motives that 
are hardly to be distinguished from the highest reli- 
gious feelings and convictions which his bosom holds. 
I think it would be hard to tell where, in the sublimer 
walks of the soul, patriotism leaves off and religion be- 
gins. In many of its humbler manifestations patriot- 
ism doubtless halts this side of heaven, but when it be- 
comes sacrificial, its incense curls around the pillars of 
The Eternal Throne. 

It is to Christian patriotism that we are to look for 
all the motives which have any legitimate place in gov- 
ernment, and the management of public affairs, yet it 
is to patriotism that resort is rarely made. For the 
selfishness of supremely selfish men has organized other 
and baser motives, by which all public policy is fash- 
ioned. The love of power and the love of office and 
the love of money have all conspired in the organization 
of parties, which live upon lies, and which uniformly 
die, at last, for lack of dupes, or perish of their own 
corruptions.- It is possible, of course, that two equally 
patriotic men may differ widely in their views of pub- 



To JefFerfon Davis Jones. 271 

lie policy— so widely that their opinions may furnish a 
legitimate basis for opposite political parties. Theo- 
retically, therefore, political parties have legitimate 
ground to stand upon, but practically they are a curse 
to the country. For the love of party has always 
usurped the place of the love of country. Everything, 
on every side, is done in the name of patriotism, of 
course ; but patriotism is made subservient to, and is 
confounded with party interest. Men forget " our 
country " in their mad devotion to " our side." It has 
always been so ; I fear it will always be so. History 
makes a uniform record of the fact that however patri- 
otic the birth of a party may be, and however patriotic 
may be the motives of the people who sustain it, it 
passes early into the hands of designing men, whose 
supremely selfish love of power controls its action and 
directs its issues, solely for personal and party advan- 
tage. 

Every thorough politician in the world — every man 
in whom love of party is stronger than love of country 
— every man in whom the love of power is the pre- 
dominant motive — is a possible traitor. It matters not 
what party he may belong to. I make the proposition 
broad enough to embrace all parties, and believe in it, 
as I believe in any fundamental truth of the Universe. 
A politician is a man who looks at all public affairs 
from a selfish stand-point. He loves power and office, 



272 Letters to the Jonefes. 

and all that power and office bring of cash and consid- 
eration. Public measures are all tried by the standard 
of party interest. A measure which threatens to take 
away his power, or to reduce his personal or party in- 
fluence, is always opposed. A measure which prom- 
ises to strengthen his power, or that of the party to 
which he is attached, is always favored* The good of 
his country is a matter of secondary consideration. 
His venality and untruthfulness are as calculable, under 
given circumstances, as if he were Satan himself. I 
know of no person so reliably unconscientious as the 
thorough politician, and there is no politician of any 
stripe that I would trust with the smallest public in- 
terest, if I could not see that his selfishness harmonized 
with the requirements of the service. Therefore I say 
that every politician is a possible traitor. There is not 
a man in America who loves his party better than his 
country, or who permits party motives to control him 
in the discharge of his duties as a citizen, who would 
not betray his country at the call of his party. 

I introduce my letter to you, Mr. Jefferson Davis 
Jones, with these statements, that I may the more 
easily show you to yourself, and justify my opinion of 
you ; for it will be hard for me to convince you and 
the public of your immorality. The public mind is 
thoroughly sophisticated on this subject. The public 
haft a suitable horror of gambling with dice and cards, 



To Jefferfon Davis Jones. 273 

but is quite ready to call those most indecent and im. 
moral games of chance which Wall street plays " oper- 
ations in stocks." Nay, the public permits these oper- 
ations to fix the prices of the property it holds in its 
hands, and, indirectly, of the bread it eats. It is quite 
as oblivious of the real character of the politicians who 
lead it by the nose. A clever politician, who manages 
to keep power in his hands for personal and party ends 
— who is unscrupulous in the choice of means for se- 
curing his purposes — who is not even suspected of a 
patriotic motive in any act of his life — is regarded 
with a degree of admiration and esteem. He wins the 
objects of his desire, and his success crowns his efforts 
with respectability. Jefferson Davis, himself, finds it 
for his personal and political interest to plunge the 
country which has honored him into the most terrible 
war known in history, and the people are filled with 
horror at his treachery and his ingratitude. Jefferson 
Davis Jones, actuated by the same motive, opposes 
him ; and one is just as bad as the other, and owes to 
circumstances, and not to his principles, the fact that 
he is not in the other's shoes. If Jefferson Davis 
Jones, who now prates of liberty and patriotism and 
sundry party words and phrases, were in the dominions 
of Jefferson Davis, he would be his most willing in- 
strument, without the slightest change in the ruling 
motive of his life. 

12* 



274 Letters to the Jonefes. 

Do you not feel, sir, that this is so ? Do you not 
know that to all intents and purposes you make mer- 
chandise of your country ? Do you not regard, and 
have you not for years regarded, politics as a grand, 
exciting game of mingled chance and skill, at which 
opposing sets of men play, not that advantage may ac- 
crue to their country or its institutions, but that the 
stakes of power and plunder may be won for selfish 
use ? Of course you know this ; but it is not so much 
a matter of course that you know this view to be im- 
moral, and this treatment of your country sacrilegious. 
You have been bred to these things among men who 
were honored and' respected. You have learned to 
gamble for power from men who first used you as their 
tool. You have learned all the tricks of the political 
hells. You pull wires, and play puppets, and veil your 
selfish purposes behind sacred names, and lie to the 
people whom you make your dupes. Open falsehood, 
wicked innuendo, cunning evasion, shameless suppres- 
sion, downright fraud — not one of these instruments 
do you hesitate to use when occasion demands for se- 
curing your personal and party ends. I tell you, sir, 
that these lies and subterfuges, over which you laugh 
and jest in private, are outrageous crimes against liber- 
ty, against good government, against a patriotic people, 
against the public morals, against God. 

What is this country that you are playing with so 



To JefFerfon Davis Jones. 



275 



carelessly — whose interests you are making secondary 
to your own? It is the present home of thirty mil- 
lions of people — the future home of uncounted hun- 
dreds of millions of people, whose destiny is to be 
shaped and decided in a great degree by the institu- 
tions of the country, and the men who make and ad- 
minister its laws. You cannot tamper with a single 
human right without awaking the groans of whole 
generations of men. You cannot cram a lie down the 
public throat, and manage to incorporate that lie into 
the public life, without vitiating the issues of that life 
through all coming time. You and your friends can- 
not lead the nation into mistakes of theory and practice 
without leading it into certain and serious disaster. 
This country, while I write these lines to you, is suffer- 
ing indescribable evils from the influence of just such 
men as you. The rebellion which costs us hundreds 
of thousands of priceless lives, and thousands of mil- 
lions of treasure, is entirely the work of politicians ; 
and if it should fail to be suppressed, and the national 
honor should fall short of entire vindication, it will be 
through the machinations of politicians. The people 
of this country are patriotic and loyal, and their action 
will, in the main, be patriotic and loyal, when they are 
not deceived by you and men like you. We have only 
politicians to fear. Selfish men have played their 
games for power over this country too long ; and now 



276 Letters to the JonefeSi 

we have the day of reckoning. Not a man falls in this 
horrible war who does not owe his death to those 
scheming politicians, who, in the past, have regarded 
their country simply as a chess-board on which they 
could play their game for power. 

What is this country that you are playing with so 
carelessly ? I ask again. It is that for which a mil- 
lion men have voluntarily risked all of good that is 
covered by the name of " life." It is that for which 
the great and generous have been willing to relinquish 
home delights, and home pursuits, and fond hopes and 
expectations, taking upon themselves the burdens of 
the camp, and yielding themselves to the sad chances 
of the battle field. It is that for which a nation of 
Christians has prayed before God with faithful per- 
sistence, mentioning its name with tenderest love and 
reverence, morning and night, among the names they 
love best. It is the inheritance of our precious chil- 
dren — an inheritance that may be one of honor — that 
may be one of shame. It is the property of history. 
Far down the vista of time, I see the man (whom it 
requires no prophetic eye to see) whose mind will 
weigh the character of this country, and whose pen 
will give his judgment record. I see him sitting in the 
light of a dawning millennium, while the lurid fires 
that now fill the sky with ilame only feebly light the 
hem of the far horizon. You and I will have been dust 



To Jefferfon Davis Jones. 277 

five hundred years, when that calm pen shall begin its 
story — a story which shall determine for all the follow- 
ing generations of men whether you and I had a coun- 
try or whether we died without one, or whether we 
were worthy of one, — a story which shall tell whether 
we wasted our inheritance — whether we bartered it 
away for party advantage, or saved and sanctified it by 
our patriotism. This man, so certainly unborn — so cer- 
tain to live — has this country in his hands to present 
to the great futurity of the world. He has you and 
me and all that we hold dear in his hands, and we can- 
not help ourselves ; and this country of ours we hold 
in trust for him. Shall we betray our trust, and damn 
ourselves and our country together ? 

That which gives me most apprehension for the fu- 
ture of my country is the fact that its affairs are in the 
hands of such as you, and are likely to be. Theoreti- 
cally, we are a self-governing nation ; practically, we 
are governed by designing politicians. Theoretically, 
the people select their own candidates for office, and 
elect them ; practically, every candidate for office is 
selected by the politicians, the candidate himself being 
of the number, and the people are only used for voting, 
and for confirming the decrees of their political lead- 
ers. For fifty years this country has not been gov- 
erned in the interests of patriotism, or been governed 
by the people. For fifty years, patriotism has not 



278 Letters to the Jonefes. 



ruled in Washington, or in any of the political centres 
of the nation. Occasionally, a true patriot has been 
placed in power, but it has always been a matter of ac- 
cident. Occasionally, a patriot has been " available " 
for carrying out the purposes of the politicians, in 
their strife for power. But often imbecility and rascal- 
ity have been found " available," and politicians have 
not failed to take advantage of the fact. Selfish party 
men have ruled the country, and selfish party men are 
trying to ruin it. It is beyond dispute that the politi- 
cal leaders of the people of this country have uniform- 
ly been men without religion, and without even the 
pretension of religion. When a political man or a 
candidate for oifice has been found to be religious, the 
fact has been advertised as a remarkable one. Look 
at the great political leaders ; then at the lesser ones ; 
then at the whole brood of petty politicians who are 
their tools and the recipients of their favors. You 
know that you cannot find, in all the country, a class 
of men less regardful of Christian obligation, or more 
thoroughly the devotees of selfish interest. 

Yet this is called a Chistian nation ! The theories 
and the institutions of the country are Christian, but 
the practice and the administration has as little to do 
with Christianity as possible. Do you and your asso- 
ciates, when laying out and prosecuting a political cam- 
paign, ever consult Christianity, — either its dictates or 



To Jefferfon Davis Jones. 279 

its interests ? Are you Christian in your treatment of 
an opponent ? Are you particular to use only Christian 
means in forwarding the interests of your candidates 
and your party ? Do you push a Christian principle 
any further than it will pay as a party principle ? Do 
you not uniformly pander to the prejudices of the igno- 
rant, and natter the vices of the vicious, while, at the 
same time, you hypocritically pretend to respect the 
religious convictions of the better elements of society ? 
Do you not mingle with the degraded, and court the 
smiles of those who live upon social vices, and descend 
to the meanest tricks to compass your ends ? You can 
have but one answer to these questions. The political 
machinery of this country — that by which elections are 
carried, as they always are carried, in the interest of a 
party — is simply and irredeemably unchristian. It has 
not in it even the poor quality of decency. 

I have talked in a general way to you about these 
things, because you are only a representative of a 
class, and because I am more interested in my country 
than I am in either you or your class ; but it is proper 
that I say something to you about the effect of your 
political life upon yourself. You have probably seen 
enough of it to learn that its lack of religious principle 
is not attributable entirely to the fact that only bad 
men engage in it. You have learned that many men 
who have gone into political life good men, have come 



280 Letters to the Jonefes. 

out of it bad men. You have seen Christian men there 
who failed to maintain their integrity among the temp- 
tations that assailed them. You have seen good men 
elected to office, by a combination of influences, who, 
in their selfish desire to retain their places have thrown 
themselves into the hands of such as you, and have be- 
come as mean and unprincipled as any of them, A 
minister of the gospel, turned politician, will show the 
degrading power of his new associations quicker than 
any other man. There has seemed to be an impression 
in the minds of Christian men that duplicity and trick- 
ery are indispensable to a politician, and not only 
necessary, but justifiable. It has been the practice to 
recognize other than a Christian rule of action in polit- 
ical affairs, so that, after a Christian man has been in 
political life sufficiently long, he usually wears out his 
Christianity. It is impossible for a Christian to go 
into political life, and stay there as a party man, and 
join in the operation of party machinery, and retain a 
conscience void of offense. 

How is it with you ? I remember the time when 
you were not only a patriot, but professedly a Chris- 
tian. I remember when you first held office ; and of 
the Christian patriotism which actuated you in your 
first party strife I never had a doubt. You worked 
faithfully and well for what you believed to be the 
right. The selfish crowd with whom you now asso- 



To Jefferfon Davis Jones. 281 

ciate looked on with approval, because you helped 
them ; but they regarded you as verdant, and knew 
with measurable certainty that your generous zeal 
would soon find rest in calculating selfishness. Your 
term of office expired, and you were in want of office 
again, and then you found yourself in the hands of 
those who you had already learned were unprinci- 
pled. They had called on you for money for party 
purposes — money which you knew would be spent in 
an unchristian way, and you had given it to them. 
You became aware that they had placed a market value 
on your Christian character, and had calculated on the 
amount that your patriotic unselfishness would add to 
their capital. You learned then to scheme with them. 
You grew unscrupulous in the use of means. You 
learned to regard politics as a game, and you deter- 
mined to become a player. It took but a short time 
for you to become an adept, and when you had con- 
quered the political trade thoroughly, you had become 
a demoralized man. I do not think you a debauchee, 
or a thief, or a murderer ; but you have lost your sin- 
cerity, your moral honesty, your Christian purpose, 
and your patriotism. I can hardly imagine a character 
more utterly valueless than yours. You have come to 
measuring everything by a party standard. You look 
upon every public question, every matter of policy, 
and every event, as a party man. You belong to that 



282 Letters to the Jonefes. 

hellish brood of political buzzards who cannot bear of 
a battle, or scent a rumor of war or of peace even, 
without calculating first what party advantage can bo 
gained from it. 

I suppose that if I were to give utterance to my 
wishes and my aspirations touching the future of my 
country, I should be called Utopian. But that which 
is possible, and that which is desirable on every Chris- 
tian and patriotic consideration, is not Utopian, and I 
should be forever ashamed of being scared by the 
taunt. This country is to be saved to freedom and to 
happiness and justice, if saved at all, by the Christian 
patriotism of its people, and by the institution, in the 
place of party machinery managed by unprincipled 
men, of some system of popular expression that shall 
place good men in power, and bad men in prison, 
where they belong. It is easy for you and your asso- 
ciates to sneer, — easy to say that this is all imprac- 
ticable, that the people cannot possibly prevent you 
from pulling the wires, and that, moreover, you will 
continue to use the people for your own selfish ends, 
and use them with their consent. I say it is not Im- 
practicable, because it is in the line of Christian and 
patriotic duty, and is not impossible. I say that this 
change must be made, or we must, as a nation, be for- 
ever going through financial revolutions, social convul- 
sions, destructive wars, and all that terrible catalogue 



To Jefferfon Davis Jones. 283 

of national calamities which attend the management 
of a riation for selfish ends. The Christian and patri- 
otic men of this nation must rise, under Christian and 
patriotic leaders, whom they shall choose, and depose 
the infernal crew with which you hold association, or 
we must, as a nation, drift along in a state of constant 
social warfare, to land at last in anarchy. A nation 
that is governed by its worst men, who have at com- 
mand its worst elements for that purpose, must go to 
wreck. Only the nation that governs its worst men, 
and holds its worst elements in subjection, can live. 
You must die, therefore, or the nation must die. 
Which shall it be ? 



THE TWENTIETH LETTER. 

CONCERNING THE POSITION OF HIMSELF AND HIS 
PROFESSION. 

I HA YE abundant reason to hold you in profound 
and tender respect. Your devotion to me in sick- 
ness, your benevolent self-sacrifice among the poor, your 
sympathy for the young and the weak, your uniform kind- 
ness and politeness among all classes of people, and the 
Christian spirit and the Christian counsel that you have 
been able to bear into all those scenes of suffering among 
which your life is mainly passed, have won my reverent 
affection. I have never heard you utter a coarse word 
in the presence of a woman, or jest with coarse women 
upon themes with which your profession makes you 
unpleasantly familiar. You are a Christian gentleman ; 
and may God bless you for all the comfort and cour- 
age which you have borne to a thousand beds of suffer- 



To Dr. Benjafhin Rufh Jones. 285 

ing and dying, for all the pleasant words you have 
spoken to the tender and the young, and for the excel- 
lent personal example that, throughout all your life of 
ministry, has made every act an exhortation to noble 
endeavor and your j>resence a constant benediction ! 

I have noticed, in my intercourse with you, your 
profound respect for your profession. You have felt 
that a share of its honor was in your keeping. A light 
word spoken of it has been felt by you as a personal 
insult. You have regarded it with more than the love 
of a lover; you have guarded its honor with more 
than the sensitiveness and chivalry of a son. You 
have believed in it, and honestly labored to give to it 
a high place in public esteem. This enthusiastic love 
and admiration of your profession, which you have 
brought down, without abatement, from the days of 
early study, is accompanied by the most devoted fra- 
ternal feeling toward your professional brethren. You 
guard their honor jealously, and carry more than your 
share of that esprit de corps which holds together the 
band of physicians of which you are the best member. 
This love of your profession, and this regard for those 
who practise it, lead you, on all occasions, to take side 
against the public in such medical disputes or contests 
as may arise, and tempt you into positions which com- 
promise your candor and betray your conscience. The 
only place in which you have shown yourself to the 



286 Letters to the Jonefes. 

public as a weak man has been in the position of de« 
fender of professional incompetency — a position taken 
simply through an extravagant respect for your pro- 
fession, and an incorrect view of the duty which you 
owe to its practitioners. A professional brother, pros- 
ecuted for mal-practice, is always sure that you will do 
what you can to clear him. Any notorious case of in- 
competent medical or surgical management, which the 
public gets hold of, and tosses about, to the disgrace 
of the profession and the physician who is responsible 
for it, you always take up and treat tenderly. People 
have learned that you will not patiently hear anything 
reflecting upon your profession, or those who represent 
it. This is all true with relation to what is known in 
the world as " the regular profession." There is a 
" regular " profession and there is an " irregular " pro- 
fession. I do not know that your charities ever ex- 
tended themselves far enough to embrace any member 
of the medical fraternity who was not strictly " regu- 
lar." If you have been devotedly friendly to all who 
have practised in the regular way, you have been un- 
compromisingly bitter toward all who have practised 
in an irregular way, with or without regular diplomas. 
The only bitterness I ever heard from your lips was 
poured out upon the head of some " quack*," or upon 
quackery generally. I do not think that you ever, for 
a moment, admitted to yourself that an irregular physi- 



To Dr. Benjamin Rufh Jones. 287 



cian had cured a case of disease, or could possibly pre- 
scribe for a case of disease intelligently. You would 
never admit the most intelligent quack that lives to a 
professional or social equality with yourself. You 
have only contempt for the whole brood, and for all 
who have anything to do with them. You cannot 
take yourself socially away from many whom you call 
dupes to quackery, but, in your heart, you partly pity, 
partly blame, and partly despise them all. 

Now, my friend, you are not generally an unreason- 
able man, and I insist on your taking good-naturedly a 
few things I have to say to you. I know that you think 
I have no right to touch upon a subject like this, but, as 
a representative of the public, I know I have, and I pro- 
pose to do it. Is the profession of medicine, practised 
in the most regular way, by the most regular men, so 
nearly perfect in its operations and results as to deserve 
the enthusiastic respect which you accord to it ? Do you 
find medicine so uniformly successful and so reliable in 
your own hands, with the best regularly acquired knowl- 
edge to guide you in its exhibition, that you can have 
any degree of certainty that you are doing the best thing 
there is to be done ? Is the profession of medicine, as 
it is understood and practised in this country, so rich 
in knowledge that it can afford to shut out of itself 
such truth as may flow to it through irregular chan- 
nels ? Is it so successful in the treatment of disease, 
11* 



288 Letters to the Jonefes. 

and so much more successful in the treatment of dis« 
ease than various forms of irregular practice, that it 
has a right to condemn without exception or qualifica* 
tion the irregular practitioner, and call him a quack ? 
Sir, the arrogance of the position which medical men 
assume, in this and other countries, is an insult to the 
spirit of the age and the intelligence of the people, and 
has been carried to the extreme of absolute inhumanity. 
I have known a regular physician approach the victim 
of an accident, and, when his immediate services were 
needed, turn away from the wretch without lifting a 
finger, simply because he saw that he should be obliged 
to work in company with an irregular physician. I 
have known an eminent regular physician go a hundred 
miles to see a patient lying at the gates of death, with 
a dozen hearts ready to break around her, and turn on 
his heel without looking upon her face, and leave her 
to die, not because he did not find a " regular " physi- 
cian at her bedside, as a regular attendant, but because 
that regular physician did not happen to belong to a 
certain medical society ! 

I repeat that you are not generally unreasonable, 
and I should like to know what you think of this. I 
could multiply instances like these that I ha^ve given 
you ; and what do they prove ? To my mind they 
prove simply that esprit de corps in your profession has 
degenerated into contemptible clannishness and parti- 



To Dr. Benjamin Rufti Jones. 289 

sanship. I doubt whether you would decidedly con- 
demn the acts to which I have alluded, and have little 
question that you would be guilty of similar ones on 
occasion. You and your professional brethren act as 
if you believe that you hold the exclusive right to ad- 
minister medicine and get pay for it, as if you possess 
exclusively all medical knowledge worth possessing, 
and as if you mean to maintain your rights against all 
disputants, by any available means. Tou are not alone 
a mutual admiration society ; you are a mutual insur- 
ance company. You mean to lord it, medically, over 
the community, and over each other. No man of your 
profession can step outside of the regular field to ex- 
periment and prosecute inquiry without having his 
heels tripped from under him. Every man must toe 
the regular crack, or he is at once socially and profes- 
sionally proscribed. Now I confess that this is spirited 
and positive treatment, but it strikes me to be out of 
keeping with the times, and inconsistent with the good 
of the public. Moreover, what you call quackery and 
the patronage of quackery, thrives on this treatment. 
The freely thinking and independent men of your pro- 
fession leave you, disgusted, and the people rebel. 

Why should you and your associates set up for ex- 
clusive possessors of medical wisdom ? You know very 
well that all medicine is empiricism, and you know 
that medicine has made advances only by empiricism. 
13 



290 . Letters to the Jonefes. 

Your true policy is to take into your hands, and hon- 
estly and faithfully try, all those remedies which have 
received the indorsement of any considerable number 
of intelligent men. Your duty is to have your eyes 
constantly open for improvement, and to take it when 
you can get it. Almost every system of quackery 
under heaven has been found to have in it some good 
— some basis of truth — some valuable power or prin- 
ciple, which it has always been the business of the 
regular profession to seek out and incorporate into 
their system. No man of sense believes in universal 
remedies ; but because a remedy is not universal it is 
not, therefore, valueless. Cold water cannot cure every 
ill that flesh is heir to, but the fact that it can cure a 
great many of them is just as well established as any 
fact in natural philosophy. You, however, will not 
use cold water, because cold water is used by quacks, 
and because cold water is claimed by some quacks to 
be a universal remedy. Preissnitz was a quack — re- 
garded and treated by the medical profession as a 
quack — but the world has recognized him as a philoso- 
pher and a benefactor, and after the prejudices against 
him shall have been outlived, that which he has done 
for medicine will slowly, and under protest, be adopted 
into regular practice. 

You and your professional brethren have a very 
hearty contempt for homoeopathy, but homoeopathy is to 



To Dr. Benjamin Rufli Jones. 291 

do you and your friends good, in spite of yourselves. 
"NTo man of sense believes that allopathy is all wrong 
and honicBopathy all right, but a man must be an idiot 
to suppose that a system of medicine which has won 
to itself large numbers of skilful men from the regular 
profession, and secured the approval, when compared 
directly with regular practice, of as intelligent people 
as can be found in this or any other country, has noth- 
ing of good in it. For you, without experiment, with- 
out observation, without careful study, to call homoe- 
opathy a system of unmitigated quackery, and to hold 
those in contempt who practise and patronize it, is a 
piece of the most childish arrogance. This is neither 
the way of true science nor liberal culture. You may 
be measurably certain that there is something in homoe- 
opathy worthy, not only of your examination, but of 
incorporation into your system of practice. It has 
already modified your practice while you have been 
talking and acting against it. You are not exhibiting 
to-day a third as much medicine as you did before 
homoeopathy made its appearance. It has killed the old 
system of large dosing, let us hope, forever. This is a 
fact ; and what you call no medicine at all has at least 
shown itself to be better than too much medicine, even 
when administered in the regular way. You say that 
a homoeopathic dose cannot affect the human constitu- 
tion, in any appreciable degree. A million men and 



292 Letters to the Jonefes. 

women stand ready to-day to swear that, according to 
their honest belief and best knowledge, they have 
themselves been sensibly affected by homoeopathic 
doses, and that, on the whole, they prefer homoeo- 
pathic to allopathic practice in their families, judging 
from a long series of results. 

Now, what are you going to do with facts like 
these? You cannot dismiss them with a contemptu- 
ous paragraph, and a wave of the hand, and maintain 
your reputation as a candid man. If you are a free 
man, and not under bondage to the most contemptible 
old fogyism that the world ever gave birth to, you will 
act as a free man. You will permit no man to limit 
your field of experiment and inquiry, and allow no so- 
ciety or clique to prevent you from extending medical 
science over all the facts of medical science, wherever 
you may happen to find them. I am the champion of 
no one of the thousand " pathies " that occupy the field 
of irregular practice, and I have alluded to two of 
them only because they are prominent. I address you 
simply as a catholic searcher after truth ; and I declare 
my belief that the regular profession of medicine has 
failed to keep pace with other professions — that medi- 
cal science has lagged behind all the other sciences of 
equal importance to mankind — simply because it would 
not accept truth when it has been associated with the 
error and the pretension that is so apt to accompany 



To Dr. Benjamin Rufli Jones. 293 

the advent of truth in every field. The science of 
medicine embraces, or should embrace, all the facts of 
medicine, and when you, or your friends, proudly de- 
cline to entertain a fact because it was discovered by 
an irregular empiric, you are not only false to science, 
but false to humanity. 

You cannot but notice a growing tendency in the 
public mind to break away from the regular practice, 
and to embrace some of the numberless forms of irreg- 
ular practice. You notice this with pain, and so do I, 
because I know that if the regular profession were to 
pursue a different policy, the fact would be otherwise. 
You must notice with peculiar pain that this defection 
is not confined to the ignorant and the superstitious, 
and that, more and more, it takes from you the intelli- 
gent and the learned. Why will you be so stupid as 
not to see that this waning of respect for the regular 
practice is owing to the bigotry and intolerance of the 
regular practice ? You assume too much — more than 
you can carry. You assume to be the sole possessors 
of the medical wisdom of the world. Every man who 
does not practise in your way, though he may have 
been a graduate of a regular medical college, you as- 
sume the privilege of condemning as a quack ; and you 
deny to him not only professional but social position. 
You place all matters of professional etiquette before 
the simplest humanities, and intend by your policy to 



294 Letters to the Jonefes. 

coerce the public into your support. The rules of 
your associations are intended to hold their members 
to the regular field, to compel them to fight all irregu- 
lar practitioners out of the field, and to force the pub- 
lic into the exclusive support of the regular practice. 
It is a thorough despotism, and intended to be ; and is 
so discordant with the free spirit of the time that the 
public rebel, and many are driven into extremes of op- 
position. 

Do you ask me if I am a medical "Eclectic?" 
No ; I am nothing of the kind. I am a catholic, with 
every prejudice, predilection, and sympathy of my 
mind clinging to the regular practice. I have a con- 
tempt which I cannot utter for all these " completed 
systems " of irregular practice, which are built upon 
some newly-discovered or newly-developed fact in medi- 
cine. I have only contempt for the broad claims of 
quackery in every field. When a man tells me that 
the regular practice is murder, and that drugs are 
never administered in allopathic doses with benefit, I 
know simply that he is a fool. And when an adherent 
of the allopathic school tells me that such and such 
things cannot be, in the range of irregular practice, 
which I know have been and are, I know he is a fool. 

I write in my present strain to you, because I be- 
lieve that through what is called the regular practice 
the future substantial advances of medicine are to be 



To Dr. Benjamin Rufli Jones. 295 

made. Medical science can only go about as fast aa 
you permit it to go. You are too well organized, you 
have too many schools, you have too much power, to 
permit any outside organization to get the lead, and to 
become the standard authority of the world. My doc- 
trine is that you should become the solvent of all the 
systems, and not the uniform and bitter opponent of 
everything that claims to be a system. You should 
make your system one with universal science, one with 
humanity, and not build a Wall around it. "When a 
man gets so bigoted that he can say that a thing can- 
not be true, because it is not according to his system, 
he has become too narrow for the intelligent practice 
of any profession. 

The church is getting ahead of the medical profes- 
sion, very decidedly. It is but a few years ago that 
Christians of different sects had just as little toleration 
for each other as the different sects of medical men 
have now. There was one of these sects that was 
" the regular thing," and those who departed from it 
were made to suffer socially. It was in this country, 
in a degree, as it is in England now. There is the es- 
tablished church — the recognized church — and all the 
Protestants outside of it are independents. These in- 
dependents are looked down upon socially, and regard- 
ed with a contempt quite as, profound as that which 
you feel for " quacks " and their " dupes ; " yet it is 



296 Letters to the Jonefes. 

coming to be understood in England that the substan- 
tial Christian progress of the time is being made by 
the despised independents, and it is felt that by their 
influence they are working a revolution in the estab- 
lished church which will, at no distant day, give to it a 
new vitality and a fresh impetus. You may fight this 
revolution in medicine, but it is coming, and when it 
shall come, you will find that what you call quackery 
will fall before it. 

You, possibly, suppose that there are no intelligent 
and scientific men engaged in irregular medical prac- 
tice. If there are not, it is the fault of your own 
schools, for they have been educated in them by thou- 
sands ; and the practical point at which I aim is this : 
that you and they shall meet as scientific men, and that 
as scientific men you and they shall reveal the results 
of experiment and inquiry in your various fields of ob- 
servation. I would have you win from them what 
they have learned : I would have them win from you 
what you have learned. I would have you and them 
do this in behalf of medical science, and in the interest 
of humanity. Until you become willing to do this, 
you must occupy the position of despots and bigots — a 
position which no profession, with science in one hand 
and humanity in the other, can afford to occupy. At 
present, you are creating quackery and stimulating 
quacks at a rate which no other policy could possibly 



To Dr. Benjamin Rufli Jones. 297 

effect. The means which you and your professional 
brethren are employing to keep the medical practice 
of the country in your hands, are certainly working to 
defeat your object. You must be more catholic and 
more tolerant, or your profession, and every human 
being interested in it, must suffer a range of evil con- 
sequences which I cannot measure. The position which 
you assume of holding a monopoly of all the medical 
wisdom, all the medical science, all the power of intel- 
ligent observation of disease, is a standing insult to the 
age, and is certain to be punished. 

I am aware that I am quite likely to be misunder- 
stood and misconstrued by you, my friend, and by 
those of your professional brethren who may read this 
letter. You have been so much in the habit of calling 
all irregular practitioners quacks and charlatans and 
mountebanks — of looking upon them all as either ig- 
norant or knavish, or both together, that you will be 
quite apt to charge me with favoring charlatanry and 
quackery. I ask you to associate with no knave or ig- 
norant pretender. No man can more heartily despise 
a pretender in medicine than I do, either in or out of 
the regular profession ; and, between you and me, the 
question is yet to be decided as to which side holds 
the preponderance of ignorance and pretension. As 
between licensed and unlicensed ignorance and preten- 
sion, I have no choice. I simply ask you to admit the 



298 Letters to the Jonefes. 

fact that there are just as good, true, scientific, honor- 
able, and able men outside of the regular profession as 
there are in it; that all improvements in medicine 
must come through empiricism ; that medical science is 
one in its interests, aims, and ends, and that the people 
have a right to demand that the profession which has 
its most precious interests in charge, shall not place be- 
fore those interests its own partisan purposes and preju- 
dices. I wish to have you see how utterly unworthy 
of you, personally, is your professional bigotry, and to 
induce you to do for your profession what you are so 
ready to do in all the fields of popular reform. 



THE TWESTTY-FI&Sf LETTER 



&o gjogmw forces. 
C02fCER2Tl2ra iris DISPOSITION to avoid society. 

I SOMETIMES think that I am the only person 
who understands and appreciates you, and the fact 
I take to be flattering to my discrimination, for all 
the fools believe you to be a fool. There are compara- 
tively few who know that behind your impassive spec- 
tacles there are eyes full of kindliness and intelligence, 
and that your shy manner and reticent mood cover a 
heart that longs for love and a wealth of conscious in- 
tellectual power that would rejoice in recognition. 
Few care to study you, but everybody wonders why 
you shun society. Few go toward you, because you go 
toward nobody. I never should have known you if I 
had not, by pure force of will, penetrated the armor 
of cool indifference in which you have encased your 



300 Letters to the Jonefes. 

self. I was determined to find you, and I found you. 
I was not surprised to discover in you the average 
amount of humanity, in its common powers and proper- 
ties, and more than the average amount of sensitiveness 
and gentleness. So soon as you saw that I understood 
you, you surrendered yourself to me gladly, and we held 
communion with one another, heart to heart* 

The first cause that operated to make you a solitary 
man was a sense of your incongruity with the ele- 
ments of society, or with the elements of such so- 
ciety as was around you. You looked upon the 
young, and saw them absorbed by frivolities that had 
no charm for you— engaged in pursuits which did not 
interest you. There was but little animal life in you, 
and no overflow of animal spirits ; so you had none of 
the spirit of play ; and you could take no pleasure in 
the insignificant things with which the spirit of play 
interested itself. Whenever you were thrown among 
those of your own years, you entered scenes that had no 
meaning to you, so that you were always oppressed with 
the feeling that you were out of place. You knew that 
your companions interfered with your pleasure, and natu- 
rally thought that you interfered with theirs, forgetting 
that they were thoughtless while you were thoughtful* 

This consciousness of incongruity could not long be 
entertained in your sensitive nature without very 
serious self questionings. You began to ask yourself 



To Diogenes Jones. 301 

why it was that you were an exception to the rule that 
prevailed around you ; and the more you questioned 
yourself, the more sensitive you became, until there 
was not a feature of your face, or a part of your frame, 
or a peculiarity of your speech and personal bearing, 
that was not inquired of concerning the matter. The 
result was an impulse to hide yourself from observa- 
tion, and great reluctance to enter the society to which 
your life naturally introduced you. Your conscious- 
ness that there was something peculiar in your tem- 
perament was a hinderance to you — it made you awk- 
ward and stiff. While you felt yourself to be the pos- 
sessor of more brains and more knowledge than most 
of the young men around you, you despaired of appear- 
ing to know anything. You had not the secret of self- 
possession and confident bearing. Many were your 
struggles with yourself at first, but at length you be- 
came habitually a solitary man. You lost the small 
measure of confidence which nature originally gave 
you, lost your familiarity with the forms of social inter- 
course, almost lost your self-respect. You could not 
bear to be looked at, or spoken to. You retired 
into yourself, and sought in self-communion or in stu- 
dious pursuits for the satisfaction which your nature 
craved. 

I have already suggested the character of that 
poverty of constitution which has made you what 



302 Letters to the Jonefes. 



you are. You are not a thoroughly healthy man. 
Either you are very weak naturally, with no overflow 
of animal life, or, by heavy drafts upon your nervous 
system, you have expended that life. Work, or study, 
or both together, have exhausted your stock of vitality, 
so that you have only just enough for the necessary 
uses of life. Until men and women rise to a degree 
of cultivation which few reach, it is not to be denied 
that social life is made up of, or is carried on by, the 
aggregate overflow of the animal life of society. It 
may be a humiliating consideration, but it is true, that 
where there is none of the spirit of play there is no 
social life that is worth the name. Youth is generally 
social because it is playful ; and as youth goes on to 
middle life and old age, it generally becomes less social 
because it becomes less playful. Playfulness is the 
offspring of animal spirits. There are some men and 
women who bubble throughout their whole lives with 
this overflow, and are always cheerful and charming 
companions. There are others who either never have 
it, or who lose it by expenditure in work or study, and 
who, as a consequence, become taciturn and unsocial. 
Lambs in a pasture will run races in delightful groups, 
and frolic by the hour ; but the dams that nurse them 
and seek all day among the rocks for food manifest no 
sympathy with them. In the healthy constitution, put 
to healthy work, there seems to be a stock of animal 



To Diogenes Jones. 303 

life and spirits sufficient for the individual, and a super- 
abundant amount which is intended for social pur- 
poses. You may look the world over, and you will 
find that all men and all races of men in whom this 
overflow of animal life is a characteristic are social, 
and that all men and races of men not characterized by 
this overflow are unsocial. 

Overflowing animal spirits form the stream on 
which the social life of the world floats. If other evi- 
dence of the fact were needed, than that which lies 
upon the surface, it might be found in the efforts to 
produce an artificial overflow at convivial parties. A 
company of weary men sit down to pass an evening 
together over a supper. They come together for the 
simple purpose of enjoying a gay and social time. 
They know very well that, independent of the contents 
of certain bottles, they have no power of social enjoy- 
ment of the kind they seek. They wish to bring back 
the hilarity of youth, the carelessness of youth, the over- 
flowing joyousness of youth ; but this they cannot do be- 
cause their animal life is expended. So they get up the 
best imitation they can of the departed motive power, 
and a very sorry one it is. When the artificial stimulant 
has worked its work, the company is social enough, and 
hilarious enough, after a fashion, but the fashion is a dis- 
astrous one. It will answer, however, as a proof of the 
proposition that in overflowing animal spirits is to be 



304 Letters to the Jonefes. 

found the medium of social intercourse — the menstruum 
of all social materials. Even when social life starts 
from a higher source — from the overflow of intellectual 
life— it is greatly assisted by animal spirits, and those 
men and women in whom there is an overflow of both 
animal and intellectual life are, socially, the most valu- 
able and attractive that the world contains. 

You must have noticed, even in your limited obser- 
vation, how much animal spirits will do in making a 
man — very inconsequential otherwise — socially valu- 
able. You must remember young men and women 
with ordinary powers of intellect and not more than 
ordinary personal attractions, who were deemed the 
life of every party they entered, simply because they 
had an overflow of animal spirits. If they were awk- 
ward nobody minded it — least of all did they care for 
it. They brought society a vessel full of life, and so- 
ciety was grateful for it. You took into this same 
society, perhaps, a mind well stored with learning, and 
natural gifts superior to any, yet the empty pates 
amused everybody, and set everybody talking, and 
furnished the means and medium of social communion, 
while you sat with your tongue tied, or retired in dis- 
gust. Now imagine yourself possessed of the abound- 
ing animal life which distinguishes some of your ac- 
quaintances, united with the intellectual power and 
culture which distinguish yourself, and it will be easy 



To Diogenes Jones. 305 

to see that nothing could restrain you from society. 
The overflowing man must play, and he will always 
seek somebody to play with. If he does not under- 
stand the conventionalities of society and the forms 
and manners of social intercourse, he will good-natured- 
ly blunder over them. He will be social, because he 
must expend that which is in him in play. 

I am aware that your case is not like all those which 
result in self-exclusion from society, but I believe that 
no case of such self-exclusion can be found in any man 
who possesses a healthy overflow of animal spirits. I 
find that the disposition to shun society exists very 
widely among students and studious men. I believe it is 
the truth that most authors and writers avoid society, or 
feel decidedly disinclined to it. Men who thus confine 
themselves within doors and exhaust their nervous 
energy in thought and composition, and with no vigor 
from the open air, are necessarily without an overflow 
of animal spirits ; and they will find themselves disin- 
clined to society exactly in proportion to their sense of 
exhaustion. Not unfrequently young women who have 
been distinguished for their love of society and their 
adaptedness to it lose both on becoming mothers of 
families, and never enter society again as active mem- 
bers. So it seems that just as soon as the animal life 
sinks below a certain level, the disposition to play 
naturally ceases, and the motive to enter society dies. 



300 Letters to the Jonefes. 

And now you ask me for the remedy. You ask 
me a hard question, and yet I believe that there is an 
answer to it, though a fresh and overflowing supply 
of animal life is not to be had for the asking. Un- 
doubtedly something can be done by attending to the 
conditions of a vigorous animal life. Undoubtedly a 
life in the open air among men would work a great 
change in you, but circumstances will not permit this, 
perhaps, and you seek for the next best course. 

I have said that overflowing animal spirits form 
the stream on which the social life of the world floats. 
To extend the flgure, I may say that on this stream 
some row while others ride, and the relative propor- 
tion of rowers and riders does not vary essentially from 
that which prevails on more material streams. The row-. 
ers are in the minority — the riders are in the majority, 
and if you cannot row you must be content to ride, for 
it is essential to your spiritual health that you enjoy 
the air and sunlight and change which only the pas- 
sengers upon this stream can win. If you possess no 
superabundance of animal life, you must be content to 
breathe the atmosphere furnished by others. You 
may not be much interested in general society, and so- 
ciety may not be very much interested in you, at first, 
but I am sure that if you enter it and persistently re- 
main in it, you will not fail to discover pcints of sym- 
pathy between yourself and others from which re- 



To Diogenes Jones. ' 307 

freshing and enriching influences will be received by 
you. Society will take you away from your books 
and break up your reveries, and that is precisely what 
is needed. You need to be drawn out from yourself 
and made to contribute something to the life and 
wealth of others. 

If directly entering general society seem too diffi- 
cult or too distasteful, there are various indirect meth- 
ods of entering it which are entirely practicable, and 
which need not be disagreeable. Enter some field of 
charitable effort, or public enterprise. "Whenever a 
man undertakes any effort for the good of the public, 
whether in the broad field of Christian charity or the 
equally broad field of public improvement, he at once 
comes into sympathy with a certain number of men 
and women who give him a cordial welcome. It is 
only a point of sympathy that is needed to make you 
feel at home in society. Society may be very attractive 
to you, though you have but little power to contrib- 
ute to its life, provided only that you find in it those 
with whom you have been thrown into sympathy. 
Think of the effect upon your- mind of meeting at the 
bedside of some sad sufferer, or in some hovel of the 
poor, a man on the same errand of mercy that took you 
there. You know that you would feel immediately the 
formation of a tie of sympathy between yourself and 
him — would feel that he had reached your heart, that 



308 Letters to the Jonefes. 

you had found his, and that thenceforward you could 
meet with mutual esteem. Think of the effect of la- 
boring side by side with men and women in any work 
of Christian reform, or public education, or literary 
culture. All work of this character, pursued in the 
company of others, establishes sympathy between the 
co-workers, and you have only to engage in it to wea-ve 
around yourself a net of social attractions that must 
gradually draw you out from yourself. 

You must contrive some scheme for meeting society 
half-way. You are unlike most men who shun society 
if you do not feel that it does not quite do its duty to 
you, in not coming after you. You retire into your- 
self, you take no pains to show that you possess the 
slightest social value, you do not even exhibit that 
interest in humanity generally, or in the community in 
which you live, that leads you to efforts on their be- 
half, yet, somehow, you feel that society ought to find 
you out, and bring you out, and make itself agreeable 
and valuable to you. You may rest assured that so- 
ciety will never do any such thing. I know that you 
have no native impulse to social communion — that the 
spirit of play about which I have talked is gone out of 
you even if you ever possessed it — but that which most 
men do by impulse or natural desire, you must do by 
direct purpose, and as a matter of duty. And you 
must do this at once. The penalty of failure is the 



To Diogenes Jones. 309 

gradual dwa-rfing of yourself and the sacrifice of all 
power to influence others. You have a laudable desire 
to be something and to do something in the world, and 
know that you have within you the ability necessary to 
accomplish your purposes, but without social sympathy, 
you will never know what to do, or how to do for the 
world, and the world will find it impossible to under- 
stand and receive you. 



THE TWENTY-SECOND LETTER. 

£0 %nnl it. font* 

CONCERNING HIS HABIT OF LOOKING UPON THE DARK 
SIDE OF THINGS. 

I SUPPOSE you imagine that I am about to endeav« 
or to prove to you that there is no dark side to the 
things of this life, or none worth your attention. You 
are mistaken. There is a dark side to every man's life, 
and to the world's life, which I do not think it either pos- 
sible or desirable to ignore — a dark side that is legiti- 
mately a subject of melancholy contemplation. We live 
in a world of want and disease, of sin and sorrow, of 
disaster and death. Our souls, that think and feel, that 
fear and hope, that despair and aspire, are associated 
with bodies which are subject to debasing appetites, 
to derangement, to decay, to a thousand modes of suf- 
fering incident to animal being. No mind of ordinary 
sensibility can look upon, or ought to look upon, the 



To Saul M. Jones. 311 

evils which throng the path of humanity without deep 
sadness. No man of humane instincts can realize, even 
in an imperfect and faint degree, how the earth seethes 
with corruption, and moral evil vies with physical dis- 
organization and decay in the work of darkness and 
destruction, without emotions of mingled sorrow and 
horror — emotions that cannot be relieved by the en- 
couraging reflection that the future promises an early 
dissipation of the cloud that overshadows the world. 

There are several reasons, however, why neither 
you nor any person should dwell constantly upon the evil 
that is in the world. The principal one is that no one 
can regard it perpetually, with anything like a realizing 
comprehension of that which he contemplates, without 
morbid depression or absolute insanity. A man's duty 
to humanity, no less than his duty to himself, demands 
that he shall not depress his vital tone and weaken his 
courage by the contemplation of evils for which he is 
not responsible, and for the cure or relief of which he 
needs all the strength he possesses, or will find it pos- 
sible to win. I suppose the angels of heaven, with 
their quick sympathies, might make themselves most 
unhappy over the woes of the world, and fill their 
holy dwelling-place with lamentations, but I do not 
believe they do, or that they ought to. The woes of 
the world are not put upon one man's shoulders, and 
though we may feel them keenly we have no moral 



312 Letters to the Jonefes. 

right to permit them to affect us further than to make 
our hearts tender in sympathy, and our hands active in 
ministry. If dwelling upon the woes of others had 
power in it to do them good, there would be excuse 
for it, bat it is the idlest of all painful indulgences. 
No one is benefited by it, while your own misery, thus 
awakened, is added to that which awakes it, and the 
world is only the more miserable for your misery. 
Thus your dejection is not only harmful to yourself, 
but useless to the world. It is a gratuitous addition 
to the aggregate of human woe, and widens the field 
of misery for other eyes. 

But these remarks have comparatively little prac- 
tical application to yourself, or to others prone like 
yourself to look upon the dark side of things. The men 
and women are few who are permanently depressed by 
the habitual contemplation of woes that do not person- 
ally concern themselves. I have heard of persons 
driven hopelessly insane by a contemplation of the 
destiny of wicked men, and of others whose horror 
over human condition has plunged them into Atheism, 
or some other dark form of unbelief, but these are rare 
cases. Almost all cases of permanent dejection and 
of habitual refuge in shadow are the result of personal 
trials, or of personal peculiarities. Various causes have 
contributed to make you a dejected man. I think 
there is a natural lack of hopefulness in your constitu- 



To Saul M. Jones. 313 

tion. There are great differences among men in this 
matter. Some, with naturally hopeful spirits, live 
through a hard life, and see many bitter days, yet pre- 
serve their buoyancy and their hopefulness to the last. 
Others, with a comparatively easy life and surrounded 
by pleasant circumstances, will grow sadder and sadder 
until they sink into the grave. Natural temperament is 
all-powerful to make some desponding under all cir- 
cumstances, and others cheerful under any circum- 
stances. Something of your condition is due, I do not 
doubt, to this native deficiency, though I do not think 
this deficiency so great as to be the responsible cause 
of your calamity. 

Disease is not unfrequently the cause of much of 
the permanent dejection that afflicts mankind. Hypo- 
chondria is not uncommon, and this is a genuine dis- 
ease that comes under the cognizance and treatment 
of the physicians as legitimately as rheumatism, or 
any other disease. And there may exist a general de- 
pression of the vital energies in consequence of age, or 
the disease of some of the organs concerned in diges- 
tion, whose legitimate result is depression of spirits. 
I cannot tell how much your condition is attributable 
to causes of this character, but I do not doubt that 
disease has its place among the causes. Still, neither 
natural temperament nor disease has worked this work 
alone. They have done something in furnishing favor- 
14 



314 Letters to the Jonefes. 

able conditions for the operation of other causes, with- 
out being very active themselves. I have never been 
able to find in your lack of hopefulness, or in any dis- 
ease that has been permanently upon you, the reason 
for that disposition to look upon the dark side of 
things which has become the habit of your life. You 
are probably not aware of this habit. You are prob- 
ably not aware that you never utter a hearty laugh, 
that you never confess to a moment of genuine enjoy- 
ment, that you are never willing to acknowledge that 
there is anything encouraging in your life and lot, that 
you have for years persistently believed your health to 
be in a failing condition, that you utterly refuse to 
admit that there is any palliation of your misery in any 
event that affects you. Your friends are aware that 
you are in very comfortable circumstances, that not a 
want is unsupplied, that love surrounds you with its 
tireless ministries, and that, somehow, life has many 
charms for you ; but you wonder at then- perverseness, 
or attempt in various ways to convince them of their 
mistake. 

I have spoken of your dejection as a habit, and I 
think it is one, which a sufficient power and effort of 
will can break up. I do not know, indeed, but you 
have lost this power of will in a measure, but I 
cannot think that it is entirely gone. You seem to 
have plenty of reason and a sufficiency of will with 



To Saul M. Jones. 315 

relation to other subjects ; and if you could have the 
disposition to apply both to this, you could break up 
your unhappy habit, I do not doubt. You have a habit 
of watchfulness against evil, as if you did not intend 
that Providence should ever catch you napping. You 
guard yourself equally against joy, as if afraid of being 
happier than you have any right to be. For many 
years, you have kept a look-out for death, determined 
not to be taken when off guard. This watchfulness 
against evil and against joy, has been maintained till 
it has become the habit of your life, and made you a 
miserable slave. 

Far be it from me to deny that you have suffered 
severely by sickness, by early struggles with poverty, 
and by the loss of those who were near and dear to 
you. Indeed, the blows of Providence have been 
neither few nor lightly inflicted ; but they have been 
blows for which a kind Father has provided abundant 
balm. No shame has befallen you. No dishonor has 
come to you. Nothing has happened to you strange 
to the lot of the hundreds of cheerful men whom you 
meet. I do not doubt that these blows bent you as 
grief always bends, but there was no sufficient reason 
for their breaking you. They were not the expression 
of infinite displeasure, and were not intended to fill 
your life with gloom. Nay, you profess to believe 
that all these precious lost ones of yours are in heaven, 



316 Letters to the Jonefes. 

and that soon you shall meet them there. I think yon 
are thoroughly honest in this belief, and that even your 
griefs cannot be held accountable for your habit of 
looking upon the dark side of things, and your per- 
sistent discontent. 

I look farther back than grief for the causes of 
your sadness and deeper than disease. I believe that 
the real and responsible cause of your dejection is the 
religious training of your early life, and the ideas 
which you now entertain of God and of duty. God 
has never been to you an infinitely affectionate Father, 
to whom you have been willing to give yourself up in 
perfect trust. I do not question the honesty of your 
reverence for Him, or the purity of your worship of 
Him, but your fear of Him is of such a nature that you 
seem always afraid that He will play you some trick 
— that He will call for you before you are ready, or 
that He only bears a joy to your lips in order, for some 
disciplinary purpose, to dash it away! You do not, 
like a child, trust Him — give yourself and all your 
hopes and all your life up to Him. You have no ease 
in Him — no peace in Him. You are on the constant 
watch for yourself, seeking to fathom or foresee Hia 
designs concerning yourself, and bearing — with your 
poor, weak hands — the burden which only He can 
carry without toil. God the judge — God the ruler — 
God the providential dispenser — this is your God ; but 



To Saul M. Jones. 317 

God the everlasting Father, full of all tender pity and 
compassion, wooing you to His arms, asking you to 
repose upon His bosom and give up to Him all your 
griefs and trust Him for all the future, is a strange 
God to you. Ah ! sir ! I am more sorry for you in 
this great mistake and misfortune than my words can 
tell. 

I think you have always felt that it is wrong to be 
cheerful. Your religion has been a joyless one. You 
received in early life, I cannot doubt, the impression 
that no person, realizing the brevity of life, the tremen- 
dous realities of eternity, the consequences of sin and 
the necessity of constant preparation for death and 
readiness for every affliction, could possibly be cheer- 
ful. Naturally reverent and constitutionally timid, this 
kind of teaching planted itself so deeply in your spirit 
that a better doctrine, assisted by your own reason, 
has -never uprooted it. To you, the most joyful peal 
of bells comes only with suggestions of the grave, and 
the touch of a baby's hand upon your cheek reminds 
you only of its frailty and its doom. The earth has 
been literally a vale of tears to you. As you have seen 
the young overflowing with life and joy, and dancing 
along a flowery pathway, you have sighed over them 
with an ineffable pity. You have never dared to set 
your affections upon anything, for fear that it would 
be taken away from you, or that, in some way, it would 



318 Letters to the Jonefes. 

become a curse to you. You have looked upon life 
simply as a period of discipline preparatory to a better 
life, whose joy fulness must necessarily be in the ratio 
of the joylessness of that which precedes it. Life has 
appeared to you to be only a preparation for death, 
and religion has been only something to die by. 

Now, my friend, I am very much mistaken if it be 
not one of the special offices of Christianity to release 
those who, through fear of death, have all their life 
been subject to bondage — to make the future so clear 
and attractive that it shall fill the present with joyful 
content. I know that we are directed to be ready for 
death, when it shall come ; but how can a man be 
readier than when engaged actively in pushing on the 
great work of the world, and enjoying all the satis- 
faction that must naturally flow from the consciousness 
of a future forever secure ? 

If your idea and your policy were to become prev- 
alent in the world, the world would certainly become 
more thoroughly a vale of tears than it has ever been, 
— more than you imagine it to be. Such prevalence 
would be universal paralysis. God is not interested, 
exclusively, I imagine, with the small concerns of indi- 
viduals like yourself. He watches the life of nations 
and the rise and growth of civilizations. One genera- 
tion lays the corner-stone of the state, and a hundred 
generations rear the superstructure, and numberless 



To Saul M. Jones. 319 

lives are swallowed up in the process. Lives and 
destinies overlap each other, and one continues what 
another begins. The thread of silk is not cut off be- 
cause a single cocoon is exhausted. The single cocoon 
is not missed, and if it were, there are a hundred to 
take its place. Men do not live to themselves alone 
— do not live with reference alone to that which, in 
the Providence of God, may personally befall them. 
There is a family, there is a posterity, there is a coun- 
try, there is a world to live for ; — there are great enter- 
prises to be engaged in which consult no period of sus- 
pension short of the national death or the final con- 
summation of all things. 

What headway do you think would be made in the 
world's educational and reformatory work by men 
who, like you, think that there is not much use in 
undertaking anything because death is so very near ? 
Judge for yourself. Are you an active man in any of 
the great Christian and humane movements of the 
time ? Do you ever dream of putting your shoulder 
to the wheel of progress ? No, sir. You are the sub- 
ject of mental and spiritual paralysis ; and if the world 
were made np of such as you, it would come to a dead 
halt. You have lived in your old house until it is 
tumbling down about your head, because it has seemed 
as if anything like a permanent repair of it would 
tempt Providence to take you away from it altogether. 



320 Letters to the Jonefes. 

You could tear the old house down and build a new, but 
life seems so short and death so near that even the 
suggestion of such an enterprise has appeared impious. 
You have thought only of him who proposed to pull 
down his barns and build greater, and of the end that 
came before the barns were begun. The new gar- 
ments which you put on are adopted with the sad 
reflection that you shall probably never live to wear 
them out, and every chastened pleasure which you put 
fearfully to your lips is loaded with the thought that 
you have possibly tasted it for the last time. 

What kind of a Christianity do you think this is 
to commend to a careless world ? There can be no 
question as to the relative comfort and happiness of 
the worldling and yourself. The careless worldling, so 
that he have no vice that burns his conscience, is a 
happier man than you ; and if he be a man of active, 
benevolent impulses, he is a more useful member of 
society. This continual thoughtfulness touching your- 
self, this constant carefulness of yourself, this perpetual 
watching of events with relation to their bearing upon 
yourself, cannot fail to make you selfish, — or, rather, 
cannot fail to shut out the thought of others and of the 
great interests of the world at large. 

I count that man supremely happy who, prepared 
in his heart for every emergency, and every event, has 
given himself in perfect trust to the Great Disposer, 



To Saul M. Jones. 



321 



and addressed himself with a glad heart to the work 
and the enjoyment of the present life. Such a man 
makes no calculation for misfortune and watches not 
for death, but does that which his hand finds to do, 
knowing that if he does not enjoy the fruit of his labor, 
others will, and content to take the ills of life when 
they come. Such a man sees woe only to do what he 
can to alleviate it. There is light in his eye, there is 
life in his step. To me he is the pattern Christian of 
the world. The bright side of things is with him so 
bright that its radiance quite overpowers the darkness 
of the other side. He is cheerful because he is free. 
Is it too late, my friend, for you to be relieved of this 
load of fear and carefulness and apprehension ? I think 
not. I believe that this habit of your life can be 
broken, and that many happy days can yet be yours — 
days of calm joy undarkened by a single care or cloud, 
days of heavenly hope and trust, and days of earnest, 
far-reaching work. 



THE TWENTY-THIRD LETTER. 

CONCERNING HIS NEIGHBORLY DUTIES, AND HIS FAILURE 
TO PERFORM THEM. 

NEXT to being a good husband and father, I con- 
sider it every man's duty to be a good neigh- 
bor. A good neighbor ! My heart brims with grati- 
tude as I write the phrase, for memory, by her magic 
call, summons to their places along the track of the 
past a line of ministers whose homely and pleasant 
faces are as familiar as those of my own family — min- 
isters of good to me in a thousand ways, through 
neighborly kindness. Among this long line of good 
neighbors, all of whom I remember with grateful de- 
light, there were some in whom the neighborly instinct 
was as distinct, and characteristic, and original, as 
the parental instinct, or the religious sentiment ; and I 
hereby modestly announce myself as the original dis- 



To John Smith Jones. 323 

coverer of this original neighborly instinct. Neighbor- 
ly kindness has hitherto been regarded as the offspring 
of a benevolent disposition, but such a theory degrades 
it. It is a distinct growth from a separate seed, and 
often thrives in people wljo are not remarkable for 
general benevolence. When unhindered and thrifty, 
it is, in some natures, the distinguishing characteristic. 
Before I come to the treatment of your case, I re- 
gard it as a neighborly duty to pay tribute to some of 
those good neighbors whose deeds are forever em- 
balmed in my heart. To that hearty, loving woman 
who used to flit backward and forward between her 
humble house and my childhood's home, lending more 
than she borrowed, and always returning more, bring- 
ing in tid-bits of her cooking to me, always sharing 
her luxuries with the hand that cared for me, watching 
with us all in sickness, and always declaring that she 
had done nothing at all, and was, on the whole, 
ashamed of the unworthiness and insignificance of her 
offices, my tearful thanks ! Though for many years 
she has walked in white, upon the heavenly hills, I 
hope it is not too late to tell her that the man does not 
forget her pleasant words and kind deeds to the boy, 
and that the son, though he should live to be old and 
gray-headed, will always hold in precious remembrance 
her tender service to his mother. To that old saint 
whom I used to see stealing across lots to carry food 



324 Letters to the Jonefes. 



and clothing to needy homes, and entering the back 
doors of those homes with many apologies for his in- 
trusion, my acknowledgments for his beautiful iesson ! 
To that kind woman who had a large family of bois- 
terous boys, and who not only understood that boys 
had good appetites, but that they particularly liked to 
gratify them on the night after the annual Thanksgiv- 
ing, and found attractions at her house superior to any 
other in the neighborhood, I assume the privilege of 
returning the thanks of at least twenty men besides 
myself. And to him who took a young man's hand in 
trouble, and giving him his faith and the voice of his 
encouragement, and sacrificing something and risking 
much, helped him over the hardest spot of his life into 
the field of his life's successes, my reverence ! 

Ah ! my good neighbors ! I did not dream how 
numerous you were until I undertook to recall you. 
Throughout all my life you have formed the circle 
next to that which sits around my heart. I have 
exchanged my morning greeting with you, have 
walked to the house of God with you, have met you 
at your tables and in my own home, have shared with 
you the work of neighborly charity; and, ever since I 
can remember, some of the constant pleasures of my 
life have come to me from you. In the days of dark- 
ness, your gentle rap was at my door, your whispered in- 
quiry was constant, your proffered service was always 



To John Smith Jones. 325 

at hand. And when the little form was carried out to 
be laid under the flowers, there were fairer flowers 
upon his bosom, that came from you, than have ever 
grown above it since. You are my brothers and my 
sisters, to whom I feel bound by a tie almost as sweet 
and precious as that which binds me to those who fill 
my home. 

Exactly how this rhapsody will strike you, Mr. 
John Smith Jones, I cannot tell. I do not think you 
have looked to see whether you could identify yourself 
with those of my good neighbors whom I have endeav- 
ored to recall. It seems to me that you must be con- 
scious that you are different in most respects from 
your neighbors. You must be aware that most people 
are good neighbors among themselves, as most people 
are affectionate parents. The neighborly instinct is as 
universal as the parental. Let so much as this, at least, 
be said for human nature : that without respect to 
creed or culture, men and women are in the main good 
neighbors. I have never yet seen the place where the 
offices of good neighborhood were lacking. There is 
not only the neighborly instinct engaged in this thing, 
but there is a universal personal pride that fills out 
where the instinct fails. It is generally understood 
and felt that for one neighbor to help another in 
trouble, and for one neighbor to make the path of an- 
other neighbor pleasant, is forever a fit and good 



326 Letters to the Jonefes. 

thing. This being recognized, it is felt that a gentle- 
man will do that which is fit and good, and that, to 
fail in neighborly well doing, is to fail to approve one's 
self a gentleman. I think I know many supremely 
selfish men who are always spoken of as good neigh- 
bors. They have a sense of that which is fit and good. 
They feel that no person who pretends to be a gentle- 
man will fail to do that which is fit and good with rela- 
tion to his neighbors. They feel that neighborhood 
imposes certain duties upon them which they must 
perform, or lose caste, not only with others, but with 
themselves. They feel that it is not respectable to be 
a bad neighbor. 

I suppose there may be some neighborhoods in the 
world that have no bad neighbor in them, but, nearly 
always, though the many are right, there is one indi- 
vidual in the wrong. Very few are the neighborhoods 
in which there is not one person who is a bad neigh- 
bor. In your neighborhood, Mr, John Smith Jones, 
you are that neighbor. You are always in a quarrel 
with somebody about a fence. You are always very 
much afraid that somebody has encroached upon your 
line, or is about encroaching upon your line. You 
keep a miserable dog that worries all the horses that 
pass your house, and renders it next to impossible for 
anybody, except a courageous man armed with a cane, 
to enter your door. You keep hens that enter the 



To John Smith Jones. 327 

gardens of your neighbors, and scratch up seeds, and 
rip open tomatoes, and wallow in flower beds, and 
make a nuisance of themselves from May until Novem- 
ber, leaving nobody in their vicinity in quiet possession 
of his premises. You will not take care of your side- 
walk in the winter, and I have thought that you take 
a malicious satisfaction in hearing your neighbors curse 
you as they hobble over the ice in front of your house. 
You will join with your neighbors in no effort for 
beautifying your street. Your consciousness that you 
deserve ill at the hands of your neighbors leads you to 
suppose that they are all banded against you, and shut- 
ting yourself into your own castle, you look out upon 
the little world of neighbors around you in defiance, and 
full of the spirit of mischief. You do not care how 
much you annoy' them. You would feel uncomfortable 
if you did not annoy them, and though your dog and 
your hens are a perpetual plague to them, let but a 
pet rabbit stray into your enclosure, and down comes 
your musket, and the pet rabbit dies. 

How far you are to be blamed for this it is impos- 
sible for me to say. I have no doubt that it is a legiti- 
mate apology for you to say that nature did not endow 
you with the neighborly instinct. There is really 
something lacking in you in this respect, and, so far as 
this want exists, there is an excuse for you. There is 
a lack in your nature still further than this. You are 



328 Letters to the Jonefes. 

not sensitive to feel how everlastingly disgraceful it is 
to you to be at variance with your neighbors, and to 
do those things which must necessarily make them 
dislike you. I suppose that if this letter arrests your 
attention, you will put in the further plea, or disregard- 
ing my apologies for you, put in the exclusive plea 
that your neighbors are quarrelsome, and interfere 
with you. Let me say in reply to this that I do not 
believe the man can be found who is always at variance 
with his neighbors, who is not himself blamable for it. 
I know men who are accounted good husbands, good 
parents, and good men — perhaps religious men — who 
are notorious as uncomfortable neighbors. I know 
men of irreproachable morals of whom I never heard 
a neighbor speak a kind word. In such cases the 
blame attaches to the unloved person always ; and if 
any man who may read these words, feels that, as a 
neighbor, he is not loved, let him take home to himself 
the conviction that he is the sinner, and that when he 
shall be reformed his neighborhood will be reformed. 
Quarrelsome neighbors are invariably little-minded 
persons. A really noble mind never quarrels. A really 
noble man or woman is never complained of as a bad 
neighbor. 

I think you are a worse neighbor than you were 
when you were less prosperous. Poverty not unfre- 
quently makes an excellent neighbor and an excellent 



To John Smith Jones. 329 

neighborhood. When men and women are engaged 
in a struggle for bread, and are obliged to depend upon 
mutual assistance in sickness and the various emergen- 
cies of life, they are very apt to be good neighbors. 
When you were poor, you were a tolerable neighbor, 
notwithstanding your want of the neighborly instinct 
and other noble qualities ; but since you became an 
independent man, all your show of a neighborly dis- 
position has vanished. The sense of independence has 
isolated you, and given your selfish pride the oppor- 
tunity to assert and maintain its full sway over your 
little spirit. Your house is in every sense your castle. 
It stands as coldly and as lonely in the midst of the 
neighborhood, and seems as thoroughly barred against 
neighborly ^proach, as that of Sir Launfal, that 

" Alone in the landscape lay 
Like an outpost of winter, dull and gray." 

Your fences are high ; your screens are broad ; and 
behind these you sit, and self-complacently make faces 
at the world. If you borrow of nobody, nobody bor- 
rows of you. Nobody goes near you, and you have 
abundant time to indulge in the selfish contemplation 
-of your independence. 

After all, is not this a small and miserable life that 
you are living ? Does it satisfy you ? I am prepared 
to hear that it does, but it would gratify me much to 



330 Letters to the Jonefes. 

know that you are not so utterly selfish as to be con- 
tented with it. Are there not times when you long for 
neighborly sympathy — when the face of a loving and 
kind neighbor, looking in at your door, bent upon some 
office of good will, or even asking a favor, would seem 
delightful to you ? If such times come, then are you 
not only saveable but worth saving. Sooner or later 
the time must come to every man who is worth saving, 
when he will feel that life has no genuine satisfaction 
outside of the love and respect of those who are around 
him. Our only satisfying life is in the hearts of others. 
You may content yourself with your family, but even 
for the sake of your family — for the sake of holding 
the respect of your family — you must sometimes long 
for the love and respect of your neighbors. No 
despised and hated man, conscious that he has legiti- 
mately earned the dislike in which he is held — can long 
maintain his self-respect ; and when this breaks down, 
even the worst nature will cry out for help. It must 
be that there are times when it would be a great relief 
to you to do a neighbor a favor for the asking. 

I do not question the sincerity of your belief that 
you have very bad neighbors. I do not doubt that 
you honestly consider them the worst and meanest men 
that ever constituted a neighborhood. I have no doubt 
that they have shown their worst and meanest side to 
you, and that, if the men were to be judged exclusively 



To John Smith Jones. 331 

by the aspect which they have presented to you, their 
pictures would not be flattering. But you should 
remember that your position and your words and acts 
have only been calculated to call forth that which is 
evil in them. They have shown their worst side to 
you, because you have shown only your worst side to 
them. You have provoked their indifference, their 
insolence, their petty revenges, their spiteful remarks, 
their cold rebuffs, and all their unneighborly doings. 
What there is of evil in them, they show to you, 
because you have been only a bad neighbor to them. 
Suppose, when you first entered your neighborhood, 
you had been a generous, kind-hearted, neighborly 
man, opening your house and heart to those around 
you, entering their houses, and in every possible way 
showing good feeling toward them, and doing good 
through various schemes of improvement ; do you 
think you would have seen anything of this unpleasant 
side of which you now complain ? If you have com- 
mon sense, you know that all your neighbors would 
have shown you nothing but good will, and that you 
would have been loved and honored. 

Now this good side of your neighbors, which I see, 
and you do not, you must find. You can find it, and 
though, for various reasons, it may seem to you now 
that not one of them is amiable, you may learn that 
there is not one of them who is not more worthy to 



332 Letters to the Jonefes. 

be loved than you are. How is it that they love and 
respect one another, while none of them respects and 
loves you? Why is it that you are selected as the 
object of their united dislike ? Sir, you are the mean- 
est man of the neighborhood, and yet you have times 
of believing yourself abused, and of considering your- 
self the only decent man among them all. You feel 
that there is something in you that is loveable, and 
that that something ought to be loved. That some- 
thing which your wife has found, which your children 
have found, which your mother found years ago, 
should, you feel, secure the love and good will of your 
neighbors. Are you the only man of all your neigh- 
borhood who has loveable qualities that are hidden ? 
All these men whom you have come to regard as bad 
neighbors are a good deal more loveable than you are, 
but they show their unlovely side to you, simply be- 
cause you have shown your unlovely side to them. 
Show the best part of your nature to them, and you 
will be astonished to see how quickly they will become 
lovely to you, through the exhibition of excellencies 
whose existence has been hitherto hidden from you. 
You have never shown anything but your hateful side 
to them, and it is very stupid of you to suppose that 
they will love that. 

I imagine that this kind of talk will do you very 
little good, but there are two motives which I can 



To John Smith Jones. 333 

present to you that you can measure, and that, 1 
am sure, will commend themselves to your considera- 
tion. With all your meanness, you are proud, and 
you feel that there is something admirable in manli- 
ness. Now your position as a neighbor is not a manly 
one, but it is inexpressibly childish. Are you a man, 
and do you shut yourself within the lines of your pos- 
sessions, and quarrel about fences, and lines of boun- 
dary, and encroachments ? Are you a man, and do 
you rejoice in making yourself offensive to those around 
you by petty annoyances ? Are you a man, and do 
you stand ready to pounce upon any unlucky child or 
pet of your neighbor the moment it enters your en- 
closure ? Do you call such things manly ? Are you 
not ashamed of your childishness ? The real man is 
noble. He will himself suffer inconvenience rather than 
annoy his neighbor. He will suffer wrong rather than 
betray a small spirit of revenge. He will not permit 
himself to be degraded by a quarrel that can be avoided 
by any generous and self-denying act. By acts of jus- 
tice and generosity he will compel the respect of his 
neighbors, and vindicate his claim to manliness. You 
have moral vision enough left to see all this, and sen- 
sibility, I hope, to feel that a mean neighbor is no man, 
but only a childish imitation of one. 

The second motive which I present to you is more 
selfish, even, than the first, and for that reason you can 



334 Letters to the Jonefes. 

appreciate it better. A bad neighbor has no influence. 
No man can move society, in any direction, who has lost 
his hold upon these who are around him. You have 
isolated yourself, and you reap the consequences in your 
loss of influence. You are without power upon the 
world. With all your fancied independence, and with 
all the power which money gives you, there is not a 
man who would permit himself to be moved by you. 
You must become a good neighbor if you would win 
power over others for any purpose. As it is, you are 
counted out of every ring, and have no power to call 
a ring around yourself. 

I wish I could, at least, make you and every other 
man who reads these words feel that an unpleasant 
neighbor is a nuisance. There is no good reason why 
the word " neighborhood " should not be as sweet and 
suggestive and sacred a word as " family." A neigh- 
borhood is a congeries of homes, and the home spirit 
of love and mutual adaptation and mutual help and 
harmony should prevail in it. Home life itself is in- 
complete without good neighborhood life, and every 
nan who poisons the latter is the enemy of every home 
affected by his act. 



THE TWENTY-FOURTH LETTER. 

CONCERNING HIS DISPOSITION- TO BE CONTENT WITS TEE 
RESPECTABILITY AND WEALTH WHICH HIS FATHER HAS 
ACQUIRED FOR HIM. 

YOUR father, by a life of integrity and close and 
skilful application to business, has made for him- 
self a good reputation in the world, and become what 
the world calls rich. He lives in a good house, moves 
in good society, commands for his family all desirable 
luxuries of dress and equipage, and holds a position 
which places him upon an equality with the greatest 
and best. He began humbly, if I am correctly in- 
formed, and has won his eminence by the force of his 
own life and character. I honor him. I count him 
worthy of the respect of every man ; and I find myself 
disposed to treat his family with respect on his account 
— for his sake. This feeling toward his family, which 
I find springing up spontaneously within myself, seems 
to be quite universal. The world bows to the family 



336 Letters to the Jonefes. 

of the venerable Goodrich Jones — bows, not to Mrs. 
Jones, particularly, as a respectable woman, but to the 
wife of Goodrich Jones — bows not to his children, as 
young men and women of intelligence and good morals, 
but as young people who are to be treated with more 
than ordinary courtesy because they are the children 
of the rich and respectable Goodrich Jones. 

This feeling of the world toward Mr. Goodrich 
Jones' family is very natural. It is a tribute of respect to 
a worthy old gentleman, and, so far as he is concerned, 
is one of the natural rewards of his life of industry 
and integrity. I notice, however, that the family of 
Mr. Jones have come to look upon these tributes of 
respect to them, on account of Mr. Jones, as quite the 
proper and regular thing, and to feel that they are 
really worthy of special attention, because Mr. Jones 
commands it for himself. Instead of feeling a little 
humiliated by the consciousness that they are treated 
with special politeness, not because they are particu- 
larly brilliant, or rich, or well-bred, but because they 
are the family of a rich and respectable man, they are 
inclined to feel proud of it. How they manage to be 
vain of respectability and wealth won for them by 
somebody beside themselves, I do not know ; but I 
suppose their case is not singular. Indeed, I know 
that the world is full of such cases, many of which 
would be ridiculous were they not pitiful. 



To Goodrich Jones, Jr. 837 

The thought that you, Goodrich Jones, Jr., are the 
son of Goodrich Jones, and that you bear his name, 
seems to form the basis of your estimate of yourself. 
I have already given the reason why the world treats 
you respectfully, but that reason need not necessarily 
be identical with that which leads you to respect your- 
self. If, owing to some circumstance or agency be- 
yond your control, you were to be suddenly stripped 
of all your ready money and other resources, and set 
down in some distant city among strangers, what 
would be your first impulse ? Would you go to work, 
and try to make a place for yourself ? Would you be 
willing to pass for just what you are — to be estimated 
for just what there is in you of the elements of man- 
hood, or would you endeavor to convince everybody 
that you were the son of a certain very rich and re- 
spectable Goodrich Jones, and try to secure considera- 
tion for yourself by such representation ? I presume 
you would pursue the same policy among strangers 
that you pursue among friends. You have never made 
an effort to be respected for works or personal merits 
of your own. You push yourself forward everywhere 
as the son of Goodrich Jones — indeed, as Goodrich 
Jones, Jr. You have not only been content to live in 
the shadow of your father's name, but you have been 
apparently anxious to invite public attention to the fact 

that you do. You have not only been content to live 
15 



338 Letters to the Jonefes. 

upon money which your father has made, but you seem 
delighted to have it understood that you can draw 
upon him for all you want. You seem to have no am- 
bition to make either reputation or money for yourself. 
On the contrary, I think you would look upon it as dis- 
graceful for you to engage in business for the purpose 
of winning wealth by labor. 

Now will you permit one who has bowed to you 
frequently for your father's sake to talk very plainly to 
you for your own? Let me assure you, in the first 
place, that all this respect which the world shows to 
you is unsubstantial and unreliable. The man who 
treats you with respect because your father is rich 
would cease to treat you with respect if you were to 
become poor. The man who bows to you because 
your father occupies a high social position, would pass 
you without recognition were your father, for any 
reason, to lose that position. Let me assure you that 
the world does not care for you any further than you 
are the partaker of the money and the respectability 
which have been achieved by your father. Nay, I will 
go further, and say that, side by side with the defer- 
ence which it shows for you on your father's account, 
it cherishes contempt for one who is willing to receive 
his position at second hand. You cannot complain of 
this, for you place your claims for social consideration 
entirely on your father's position. The negro slave is 



To Goodrich Jones, Jr. 339 

proud of the superior wealth of his master, and among 
his fellow slaves, assumes a superior position in conse- 
quence of wealth which is not his own. He belongs 
to a splendid establishment, and, in his own eyes, wins 
importance from the association. When his master 
fails, the slave sinks. No, sir, there is nothing reliable 
in this consideration of the world for you. You are 
only treated as a representative of the wealth and re- 
spectability of another man, and if he were to become 
displeased with you, and were to disown and disinherit 
you, you would find yourself without a friend in the 
world. 

In the second place, your position is an unmanly 
one. None but a mean man can be willing to hold his 
position at second hand. I count him fortunate who 
is born to pleasant and good social relations, and all 
the advantages which they bring him for the develop- 
ment of his personal character ; but I count him most 
unfortunate who, born to such relations, is willing to 
hold them as a birthright alone. A man who is willing 
to keep a place in society which his father has given 
him, through his father's continued influence, is neces- 
sarily mean-spirited and contemptible. Every young 
man of a manly spirit who finds himself in good so- 
ciety, through the influence of others, will prove his 
right to the place, and hold the place by his own 
merits, No man of your age can consent to hold his 



340 Letters to the Jonefes. 

social position solely through the influence of his fathe* 
without convicting himself either of imbecility or 
meanness. If you had any genuine self-respect, you 
would feel that to owe to others what you are capable 
of winning for yourself, and to be considered only as 
a portion of a rich and respectable man's belongings, is 
a disgrace to your manhood. 

I suppose the thought has never occurred to you 
that you owe something to your father for what he has 
done for you. He gave you position. His name 
shielded you through all your childhood and youth 
from many of the dangers and disadvantages which 
other young men are forced to encounter. He gave" 
you great vantage ground in the work of life, and you 
owe it to him to improve it. If your name helps you, 
you ought to. do something for your name. If your 
father honors you, you ought to honor him, and to do 
as much for his name as he has done for yours. You 
have no moral right to disgrace one who has done so 
much for you ; for his reputation is partly in your 
keeping. It would be an everlasting disgrace to him 
to bring up a boy who relied solely upon his father for 
respectability. It would be a blot upon his reputation 
to have a son so mean as to be content with a name 
and fortune at second hand. I tell you, sir, that you 
must change your plan and course of life, or people will 
talk more and more of your unworthiness to stand in 



To Goodrich Jones, Jr. 341 

your father's shoes, and express their wonder more and 
more that so sensible and industrious a father could 
train a son so inefficiently as he has trained you. 
When this good father of yours shall die, you will be 
thrown more upon yourself. You will have money, I 
presume, and you will still sit in the comfortable 
shadow of your father's name ; but the world changes, 
and strangers will estimate you at your true value, and 
those who knew your father will only talk of the sad 
contrast between his character and your own. 

I suppose you are not above the desire for the good 
will of the world. "Well, the world is made up of 
workers. The great masses of men — and your father 
is among the number— are obliged to depend upon 
their own labor and their own force and excel- 
lence of character fof wealth and position. People do 
not envy him, because he won all that he possesses by 
his own skill and industry. He is universally admired 
and esteemed, and you are enjoying some of the fruits 
of this admiration and esteem in the politeness of the 
world toward yourself ; but this will not always last. 
You must mingle in the world's work, and cast in your 
lot with your fellows, contributing your share of labor, 
and taking what comes of it in pelf and position, or 
else you will be voted out of the pale of popular sym- 
pathy. The world does not love drones, and you must 
cease to be a drone or it will never love you. 



342 



Letters to the Jonefes. 



I suppose it is hard for you to realize that you are 
not the object of envy among men, but I wish you 
could for once feel the contempt which your parasitic 
position excites even among men whom you deem 
beneath your notice. There are many young men who 
have been compelled to labor all their lives for bread, 
that would shrink from exchanging places with you as 
from a loathsome disgrace. They would not take your 
idle habits, your foppish tastes, your childish spirit, 
and your reputation, for all your father's money ; and 
these men, strange as it may seem to your mean spirit, 
are more respected and better loved by the world than 
yourself. I say that you are not above the desire for 
the good will of the world ; but, if you would get it, 
you must be a mau. You must show that you have a 
man's spirit, and that you are willing to do a man's 
work. No idle man ever yet lived upon the wealth 
won for him by others and at the same time enjoyed 
the love of the world. 

All this you will find out by-and-by without my 
telling you, but then it may be too late for remedy. 
You are now young, but, if you live, you will come at 
length to realize that instead of being envied, you are 
despised. You will make a sadder discovery, too, 
than this. You will discover that you have as little 
basis for self-respect as for popular regard. Years 
cannot fail to reveal to you some things which youth 



To Goodrich Jones, Jr. 343 

hides from you. You will find that the world is busy, 
that you have no one to spend your time with,.and 
that the men who have power and public consideration 
are men who have something to do besides killing time 
and spending money. You will find that you are with- 
out sympathy, and companionship among the best 
people, and when you ascertain the reason — for it will 
be so obvious that you will not fail to see it — you will 
learn that you are not worthy of their sympathy and 
companionship. In short, you will learn to despise 
yourself. 

I have already spoken to you of the debt which 
you owe to your father, for what he has done for you. 
There are some further considerations relating to your 
family which I wish to offer. A family name and repu- 
tation are things of life and growth. The character 
which your father has made is a product of life, so 
grand and far-spreading that his family sits beneath, 
and is sheltered by it. It is the law of all vital prod- 
ucts that they shall grow, 'or hold their ground against 
encroachment, by what they feed upon. Food must 
be constant, or death is sure to come, soon or late. 
The character of your family — its power, position and 
high relations — is the product of your father's vital 
force, working in various ways. Not many years 
hence, that force must stop its work. Your father will 
die, and unless you take up his work and do it, this 



344 



Letters to the Jonefes. 



family character will pine, and dwindle, and ultimately 
sink in utter decay. 

Look around you and see how some of v the rich and 
influential old families have died out, because there wa3 
no man in them to keep them alive. The founder of 
the family did what he could, raised his family to the 
highest social position, gave them wealth, bequeathed 
to them a good name, and died. The sons who fol- 
lowed were not worthy of him. They were not men. 
They were babies, who were willing to live upon their 
family name, and who did live upon it until they con- 
sumed it. It is sad to see a family name fade out as it 
often does, through the failure of its men to feed it 
with the blood of a worthy life ; and yours will fade out 
in a single generation, if you do not immediately pre- 
pare yourself to take up your father's work, and carry 
it on. It is always pleasant and inspiring to see young 
men who expect to inherit money entering with energy 
upon the work of life, as if they had their fortunes to 
make. It proves that they are men, and proves that 
they are preparing to handle usefully the money that is 
to come into their hands. It proves that they intend 
to win respect for themselves, and to lay at least the 
foundation of their own fortunes. When I see such 
men, I feel that the name of their families is safe in 
their keeping, and that, for at least one generation, 
those families cannot sink. The desire to be some- 



To Goodrich Jones, Jr. 345 

body beside somebody's son, shows a manly dispo- 
sition, which the world at once recognizes, and to 
which it freely opens its heart. 

I am aware that a young man in your position has 
great temptations, and labors under great disadvan- 
tages. We are in the habit of regarding a poor young 
man, who has neither family name nor influence, as 
laboring under disadvantages, and in some aspects of 
his case, we regard him rightly. But he has certainly 
the advantage of the stimulus which obstacles to be 
overcome afford. The poor man sees that he must 
make his own fortune, or that his fortune will not be 
made at all ; and the obstacles that lie before him only 
stimulate him to labor with the greater efficiency. 
When I see a poor young man bravely accepting his 
lot, and patiently and heroically applying himself to 
the work of building a fortune and achieving a posi- 
tion, I am moved to thank God for his poverty, for I 
know that in that poverty he will ultimately discover 
the secret of his best successes. 

Your disadvantage is that position and wealth have 
already been won for you. It is not necessary for you 
to labor to get bread and clothing and a comfortable 
home. These have already been won for you by other 
hands. I do not deny that this condition of things 
is naturally enervating. I confess that it takes much 
good sense and an unusual degree of manliness to resist 
15* 



346 Letters to the Jonefes. 

the temptations to idleness which it brings ; but you 
must resist them or suffer the saddest consequences. 
You must labor in a steady, manly way to make your 
own place in the world, as a fitting preparation for the 
husbandry and enjoyment of the wealth which will 
some day be yours. If you have not those considera- 
tions in your favor which stimulate the poor man to 
exertion, then you must adopt those which I have tried 
to present to you. You must remember that to be 
content with a position received at second hand, and 
to live simply to spend the money earned by others, 
is most unmanly. You must remember that you owe 
it to your father and to your family name and fame, 
to keep your family in the position of consideration and 
influence in which he has placed it, and that it is cer- 
tain to recede from that position unless you do. You 
must remember that only by work can you win the 
good will of the world around you, or win and retain 
respect for yourself. 

If the disadvantages of your position are great, 
your reward for worthy work is also great. The 
world always recognizes the strength of the tempta- 
tions which attach to the position of a rich young man, 
and awards to him a peculiar honor for that spirit which 
refuses to be respected for anything but his own manli- 
ness. I know of no young men who hold the good 
will of the public more thoroughly than those who set 



To Goodrich Jones, Jr. 347 

aside all the temptations to indolence and indulgence 
which attend wealth, and put themselves heartily to the 
work of deserving the social position to which they 
are born, and of earning the bread which a father's 
wealth has already secured. You have but to will and 
to work, and this beautiful reward will be yours. 



